I am not sure who you are asking but I suugest you take a look at the lime-technology.com forums. They have a major thread called pimping your rig. Lots of photos and specific configurations. I know mine is there, I am not sure if Kevin's is. My unRaid has 12 hot swap bays in an industrial quality case with hot swap everything (fans, PSU, drives). I even set it up so I could boot Win XP, Linux or unRaid, but ended up only booting unraid.

With regard to the Linux server unRaid is built on top of Linux slackware 13.6. There is a complete p[ackage manager as an add on that almost everyone installs that allows you to download and install slackware compliant packages. In fact one of them is YAMJ which just installs and then just runs, no issues. Didn't do well for me as a scraper but that is a different issue. There are packages for all sorts of things, C compiler, Perl, etc. I am sure one of these days wsomeone will do a squeezeserver package and make life easier for many.