Hello

I have a small LAN of 4 computers (2 winXP and 2 win98) connected to a router

I want to add a P1 200mhz with a linux distro for sharing files and a printer

the thing is that I want to download the files from the internet directly to the linux box instead of the files passing through my pc first (as far as I know this is how it works, please correct me if I'm wrong) so that the files keep downloading even if I turn off my computer

So the question is how can I do this? I planned to use remote access but I don't know any program that works with linux and windows for this purpose

Is there another way of doing this (so I can download directly from the web browser without having to access remotely the server)?

also, what linux distro is recommended for this? (small if possible as space is an issue right now and with GUI if I'm stuck with remote access)

My knowledge of linux is very limited (almost next to none) so any step-by-step help will be very appreciated

thanks

Remote access can be achieved through a ssh server on your Linux box and a ssh client (such as Putty) on your Windows boxes. If you want the OS to have an as small disk footprint as possible you will have to manage the downloads with a command-line web client (Lynx for example).

Another kind of solution could be writing a downloads-oriented web client in PHP for instance, which would run on your Linux box as an Apache module. You could hand it the urls of the files to download through an html form, and let the script do the work unattended. Could be nice and elegant but requires quite a bit of coding (not linux-specific though) IMO.

To serve the files to the Windows boxes you will need to set Samba up.