My spare laptop.

Here’s a question for you all,

I have an old laptop which I am thinking about adding to my network to work as a print server. I would also like to use this machine for some media work such as changing movie formats from mov to mpeg etc.

Currently the machine has no OS on it, I have the original XP disk so I could install that but I also would like to see if a flavour of linux could do the job as then I could use FOSS for the media work that I wish to do.

Would a linux machine be able to do this on my network or should I just install XP?