So I've got an AMD XP 1700+ with a 300GB stripe RAID and 512MB of RAM. I need it to be a personal SSH/FTP/Web Server, possibly with MySQL, as wel as being a secondary workstation for me to play with *nix on probably some IRC chat. I don't have a lot of time to deal with partitioning, installing, building, compiling, and all of that fun stuff, like a couple of days at most, for the actual kernel and system. I've got tons of time to tweak and everything. What would y'all recommend as a distro that has a good installer with good partitioning?

Among other things that I'm looking for in this box is easy Firewire suppot and dependable uptime...

Also, can anybody offer me arguments of BSD vs. Linux?