Hi

I have recently upgraded to a new config for my Pc which is a P4 2.4ghz and 256mb ram. It is a D845GVSR chipset with onboard sound card and ethernet. This pc now dual boots XP and Slack 9.1. I have some soace on it and I am planning to load debian or Fedoora

My old Pc is a IBM Pc with celeron 500 and onboard sound card and ethernet card.64mb RAM. Now it does not have a HDD which I can arrange for.
You can consider my old Pc as a diskless node.
I am planning to connect these 2 pc through a crossover cable.

My questions
1.How can I use this spare PC effectively.
2.I am linux hobbyist and want to learn in the process(networking etc)
3. For a second distro on the existing new pc and the old PC which one should I consider.
4. I am currently using slack 9.1
5.I intend to purely use the old Pc for linux only

Thanks

ninadb

1) if it will never contain a hard disk there are a couple of options...

first live cd, e.g. knoppix. boot to that and use a floppy drive to store any configs for your personalisation. you could also share a space on your main machine for a /home for this diskless machine.

alternatively an nfs mounted system, where you have a fullly fledged linux distro running via an nfs server. i've written up my version of this here: http://mini-itx.com/projects/animalsnes/ although i'd not expect your machine to be PXE enabled, in whcih case you'd need a syslinux boot disk instead.

2) not a question

3) personally i found gentoo extremely easy to install onto nfs as there's no real installation program. once you've mounted a filesystem somehwere, you just splat the base layout of gentoo onto it, and it's done. other more convetional distro's should be usable too, but i'd expect it to be harder.

4) also not a question

5) ok.. that's a 40% question ratio... not good!