I am getting an MSI Wind for my laptop in college, because I wanted something small and light that I could easily carry around with me. I am also bringing my PC for gaming and using CD's, since the MSI Wind doesn't have a CD drive. I believe the dorms all have wired internet access, and the rest of the campus is on wi-fi.
Can anyone point me to some FAQ's or reading material for setting up SSH so that I can get to files from my PC when I am somewhere else on campus? Is there any risk when I use SSH that someone else on campus could get into my PC?

There isn't much need for a guide, all Linux distributions are going to ship with the SSH client, and running an SSH server is just going to be an option in the boot scripts. Most distributions are set with sane defaults for the server, but you should still look over them to make sure (you didn't mention the distros involved here).

Using strong passwords is an absolute must (but of course, it always is) and since you are going to always connect with the same client machine it would be a good idea to use passkeys so that the server only accepts logins from the Wind.

The SSH server itself is quite secure when configured properly. Brute forcing the password is next to impossible when using timeouts and a low simultaneous client count; but you could even augment that with an automated blacklist script to block the IPs of any machines that really don't get the message. In terms of vulnerabilities, there have been some DoS attacks against SSHD in the recent past, but if you are using an updated version I am not aware of any serious remote vulnerabilities.

When I was in school, I literally used ssh every day from my laptop on campus to my server at home. I could transfer papers and whatever else I needed. Safe and secure; no problems.

Thank you, are there any faq's I can read that can help me get this set up? I go through the netconfig setup, and it asks me to give a hostname and domain name, hostname is the think that pops up in a terminal, right? "user@hostname"
Is there a page for absolute newbies on how to start?

I wouldn't allow password logins at all just keys. that way no one can log in unless they have your laptop. you can even use sshfs to mount your desktop drive on the laptop over ssh and use it just like any other drive. I'll help you set it up if you'd like. do you have both computers? what distro are they running? are you going to have a static IP or dhcp for the desktop?

Both are dhcp running slackware, but I think I would rather prefer to try and figure this out on my own, so that I know what I broke if I change something. Is there a good website I can try?

lots of good stuff over at www.tldp.org just do a search for ssh. let me know if you get stuck.

Alright, I'm still trying to get my laptop's wifi working, until then, I did find a faq online that taught me how to make a public key, and I put that on my PC (slackware 12.1)
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
The next part of the faq said to add it to the server: [here]
Using this command:
$ scp id_dsa.pub serverusername@192.168.1.40:./id_dsa.pub
Now, both PC's are running on DHCP at the moment, I'm not sure about how my college campus is going to be setup, but they said It will be wired ethernet in the dorms and wifi out of the dorms in some places around campus.
Say my login shell for my PC says user@pc while my laptop is user@laptop, so would my command be my user@alpha:./id_dsa.pub or would I use the ip I am using at the time? If I want to ssh into my laptop would I use
user@pc:~$ ssh user@laptop?
If I had my wifi working now I would try it out, but my PC is going in a box tomorrow to be shipped to college and it looks like the wifi drivers don't want to work for me any time soon.