i am wandering how to do some remote sessions with X. i know that the server and client are opposite from what is usually thought of them, but what are the procedures to get it working? and what are the core packages that you need? i'm hoping to put a very basic linux system on some old computers, and then they have an xserver, and get all the hard work done by a server.

I'm not an expert in this area by any means, but I think there are a couple of ways you can do this.

X forwarding

This way you set up an SSH connection with X forwarding turned on. In this case, you need to have a full X environment running on the local machine. If the local machine is running Windows, you'll need to install something like Cygwin to give you an X environment. I don't think that you need a full X install on the remote machine, but you might need some libraries for the programs to function properly.

VNC
This way requires a full X install on the remote machine, and you connect to the remote VNC server with a local VNC client. If you're doing this, you also need to investigate using VNC over an SSH tunnel as VNC has no security to speak of. There are VNC clients for pretty much any OS. The NX system works similarly, but supposedly has better compression than VNC, and therefore might be faster.