Starting carefree with a USB stick to upload a Ubuntu 12.04 system. The icing on the cake server accepts requests wakeonlan and can be started remotely. My son bought the same system to replace two old Debian Linux servers: once mounted discs of old systems while started without problem, including RAID (software). Very advisable therefore, especially at this price (with HP discount, it makes a server to fewer than 200). It is rather quiet, and can also serve as office machine without problem ... but no games: no sound output and very limited space to add up to two low profile cards.