Development. For me, I was developing stuff for my empeg on my laptop running Win2000, and telnet to my linux machine for any linux specific stuff. I was frequently sending and recieving files from the empeg, and if I could just drag and drop them off the empeg via samba to my Linux machine with Samba, it would save quite a bit of time.

It will also make the empeg compatible with upcomming network MP3 players for the stereo system. Instead of having to hook the empeg up to the stereo to hear the music off it, a person could simply plug it into the ethernet and allow their player to pick songs off the empeg and a home system.

I'll probably create a startup script that only starts Samba if it can ping my linux machine, that way resources are only used on Samba when it will be needed.