Itunes and my music

I currently have a freebsd server that is storing all my music/movies/video's/pics etc.

I've never been a really big fan of Itunes but I'm willing to give it a shot on my new mac. I've never owned an Ipod so I've never needed to use it. Will itunes try to import all of the music from my server (around 30gb of music) or does it only try to import music on the laptop?

I wonder if it would just be easier to get a third party music player like winamp to just play my music like I have it setup now?

You can have iTunes point to various places for your music library, so you should be able to point that across to a network share. Just make sure you turn off the 'copy music to library' option so that when you add the network library it doesn't try and copy all the files to your laptop.