I own a Pentium m laptop, an Pentium 4 desktop. Ideally I would like to use the desktop as both a separate computer as well as an external hard drive for my laptop. It would be nice to be able to fully control the desktop computer as well from my laptop. Currently I am doing all this with windows integrated remote control app. I was wondering whether some sort of software like laplink, would be a better solution. I would really like to make the desktop share my internet connection, with my laptop, so that I could host a game on the desktop, run it as a dedicated host, and have a few other computers on the network, as well as mine, play a game. Aside from all this I am learning Linux. Would Linux offer a better solution to any of my requests? Thanks

most remote control operations can be done through ssh and/or vnc, which are `compatible' with almost every OS under the sun. Plus, there are free software implementations, so porting to (at least) posix-compliant systems should be doable.

Regarding that, I think GNU/Linux should serve you better.

I have poor experience with getting games to run in wine et al. (which I assume is what you want), but then again, I didn't try very hard

All my native games (freeciv, wesnoth, gltron, powermanga, supertux, ...) run perfectly, though, but my (free software) drivers suck (or I suck, which is only slightly better)

YMMV (a lot).

hth --Jonas

I don't know if Linux will be "better" at any of those tasks, except maybe the part about hosting games (I don't know anything about that, but I gather it's easier/better to host games on a Linux server).

Linux is capable of file sharing, internet sharing, remote control, and hosting games--all with Windows as well as Linux machines. In addition, with Linux you have a few more interesting remote control options which may or may not be relevant to you. For example, with vnc you can get a remote control graphical desktop which is entirely independent of the "real" desktop. One person can be sitting at the computer using the "real" desktop while you remote control a "virtual" desktop.

With file sharing between two Linux boxes with the fast NFS file sharing protocol, you can get nearly full bandwidth efficiency. My experience with the Windows file sharing protocol is that it only gets about half that. This means that transfering files over the network is about twice as fast with Linux<->Linux than Linux<->Windows or Windows<->Windows. Of course, that extra speed may not be relevant to you--especially if you need to use Windows for gaming compatibility anyway.

You'll probably do best by using Linux on the desktop machine, while running Windows on the laptop (for game compatibility). In any case, I'd recommend dual booting both, so you can find whatever combination works best for you.

IsaacKuo: good post with relevant points. Thumbs up from me.

... But I'm not OP.

--Jonas

That is what i figure, so which distro would be good for that? I like the idea of remote graphical control while not disturbing the actual machine. any chance of remote control the linux partion while one is using the windows? prob not. also i plan on getting a big hard drive and partitioning it for storage. i will assume that all partitions of this drive will be accessable through linux?

GNU/Linux can read-write FAT (all versions, afaik), but only read NTFS.

You can't simultaneously run GNU/Linux and ms-windows natively/normally. But you can emulate one in the other.

I think there's windows drivers for ext2, but not many other FSes used by GNU/Linux (i.e. ext3, (j|x|reiser)fs.

hth --Jonas