Hello

I am running slackware 10.2 on two computers which I have networked together, one being a lot faster than the other (and mostly what I'm using for day-to-day desktop usage). For the sake of clarity, let's call them Primary and Secondary.

Primary is a computer which I have borrowed from a friend and he may want back someday. It's a p4 1.3 ghz, 384 megs of ram which 80gigs hd space and an nvidia geforce card. It also has a slow cd burner which lately has been flaking out when I try to burn music cds on it.

Secondary is a very slow k6/500mhz computer with 512 megs of ram, a dvd/cd-burner drive and 9 gigs of hd space. Mostly I have this set up as a gateway to the internet (I have a win-modem which doesn't like my primary computer; I don't have the cash to get a real modem, or else I would).

Even though it's old, I feel like I am wasting the secondary computer, so I wanted to get some suggestions about how can I better use it.

1)What is the best way to share files between the two computers over ethernet: nfs? samba? I install and uninstall OSs frequently on my primary computer so I need something fairly universal; but I have been told that nfs is a hassle to set up and that it's really slow -so I'd like to know what would be my best options as far as speed and ubiquitiousness. (simplicity is nice; but if there are clear docs it's not as important as speed)

2)For a few different reasons I don't want to rip the dvd drive out of secondary and put it in primary. Does slackware (I assume through KDE) come with tools which will allow me to utilise the dvd drive on Secondary from Primary? One I'd like to do is set it up so that I can burn files from Primary on Secondary. The other thing I'd like to do is play dvds and view them on Primary...but I have no clue how I would go about setting that up. I'm on dialup, so I want to download as little as possible (and downloading nothing at all would be ideal); this is also why I'm not on version 11 yet.

I'd appreciate hearing any pointers or suggestions you folks can give me; thanks!

nfs is not too hard to set up, and the speed of the pc, as its old, will be the limiting factor in network performance