Pick your poison for the distro. If you feel weird about installing stuff (mostly problems with dependencies) go with something like Ubuntu. It's newbie-friendly and well-built. I recommend it.
But I also recommend Slackware and Gentoo. ;P
For wireless? Pray there are native drivers, or use
ndiswrapperVS 2K5? Why not VS 2K8?
You can try Wine out, or just use VMware with a Windows VM...
Printing?
CUPS! IIRC, Apple just bought them, too.
For NTFS?
NTFS-3G seems to work well now.
Streaming media to your 360? No idea. Sorry.
Converting video formats? Ripping and encoding videos?
mencoder works wonders. Although as far as I know, the native .avi format is only watchable inside mplayer, but I've gotten the .mpg container to work with media center and its extenders... I made a batch script at some point to rip for me. And here it is:
REM rip2mpg.bat
REM Author: Newby
REM Description: Rips a DVD for you. Rips to MPEG-2 video for Media Center.
REM NOTES FOR SELF:
REM Merge *.vob into one vob: copy *.vob /B super.vob
REM CON = console, pipe to console.
REM NUL = /dev/null, create there.
@ECHO OFF
CLS
ECHO rip.bat -- Wrapper for MEncoder (http://www.mplayerhq.hu)
SET /P name=Specify the path for the output file (i.e.: c:\tmp\movie.mpg):
ECHO %name% will be the outputted file.
ECHO.
ECHO 1. Single-pass encode (faster, not as good video quality).
ECHO 2. Double-pass encode (slower, best video quality, recommended).
ECHO 3. Triple-pass encode (NOT YET IMPLEMENTED, WILL POSSIBLY BE REMOVED).
CHOICE /C:123 /D:1 /T:5 /N /M "Please choose method of ripping: "
IF ERRORLEVEL 3 GOTO TRIPLE_PASS_RIP
IF ERRORLEVEL 2 GOTO DOUBLE_PASS_RIP
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO SINGLE_PASS_RIP
GOTO END
:SINGLE_PASS_RIP
ECHO You chose single-pass rip! Ripping now...
ECHO.
MENCODER.EXE dvd://1 -really-quiet -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=2000:mbd=2:trell:keyint=15 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -alang en -o "%name%" > NUL
GOTO CHECK
:DOUBLE_PASS_RIP
DEL divx2pass.log 2> NUL
ECHO You chose double-pass rip! Ripping now..
ECHO.
ECHO First pass.. (statistics file)
MENCODER.EXE dvd://1 -really-quiet -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=2000:mbd=2:trell:keyint=15:vpass=1 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -alang en -o NUL > NUL
ECHO First pass complete!
ECHO.
ECHO Second pass.. (final output)
MENCODER.EXE dvd://1 -really-quiet -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=2000:mbd=2:trell:keyint=15:vpass=2 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -alang en -o "%name%" > NUL
DEL divx2pass.log
GOTO CHECK
:TRIPLE_PASS_RIP
ECHO Triple pass is not yet implemented! Sorry!
GOTO END
REM DEL frameno.avi 2> NUL
REM DEL divx2pass.log 2> NUL
REM ECHO First pass.. (audio track)
REM MENCODER.EXE dvd://1 -ovc frameno -o frameno.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts aq=0:preset=extreme -alang en
REM ECHO First pass complete!
REM ECHO.
REM ECHO Second pass.. (statistics file)
REM MENCODER.EXE dvd://1 -really-quiet -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=2000:mbd=2:trell:keyint=15:vpass=1 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -alang en -o NUL > NUL
REM ECHO Second pass complete!
REM ECHO Third pass.. (final output)
REM MENCODER.EXE dvd://1 -really-quiet -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=2000:mbd=2:trell:keyint=15:vpass=1 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -alang en -o temporary.mpg > NUL
REM MOVE temporary.mpg "%name%"
REM GOTO CHECK
:CHECK
ECHO Ripping complete!
ECHO.
IF NOT EXIST "%name%" ECHO There may have been a problem ripping...
IF EXIST "%name%" ECHO %name% created, enjoy!
:END
SET name=
PAUSEIt's sloppy, but it got the job done. And it wouldn't be hard to convert to a bash script.
