Sorry for the lack of input, but nearly any distro will work for you. Your choice or arch is very good as it will provide a fast small installation.

It you will be using it to consume media locally then I would like to recommend installing xbmc ( http://xbmc.org/ ) onto the system for a clean interface, xbmc is in their repos and you can find an installation guide at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XBMC

If you are interested in developing for the Linux kernel then I advise for you to join the kernel.org mailing-list and review their archives to see what has been discussed. All official development and kernel communication is done on kernel.org

Welcome to the community, I have already responded on your other post about merging pdf files.

I was originally thought about using imagemagik, but it would be slow. I recommend looking at the thread at http://superuser.com/questions/54041/how-to-merge-pdfs-using-imagemagick-resolution-problem , of the solutions using pdftk sounds like the easiest method to me.

I am running Slackware-current, but I don't think that matters much since the support for that chipset and EDAC module were introduced in 2007 and pushed to stable shortly after. In addition I did a huge search on the net about that board and found the minimum kernel version in the Debian HCL (http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/SuperMicro/X7DAL-E) which is what ubuntu is based on, so it still applies. In my search I did not find any other people reporting the same issues with the system, just a lot of hardware issues.

Have you tried swapping the HDDs and connected mobos as previously suggested? I am very curious about the outcome.

Have you verified that the SeLinux restrictions on the files in that directory are not blocking the external access?

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/SELinux