Greetings,

I'm setting up a 500Mhz 512MB RAM box as server which will not have a screen attached to it.

It shall work as an NFS and SMB server for a couple of XP boxes (with SAMBA) and be an "X server" for a couple of older laptops. By this I mean that these PC's should run their applications and get their login screen from the server, but still be running their own local UNIX for SWAP and such...

How do I go about to set this up on the server? I assume that I will have to install the full KDE on the server even though it won't be using X itself (no screen attached) and that it still has to go to run level 5 for X in order for the clients to be able to login?

Also - how do I set the clients up to maximize this performance? They have 128MB RAM and 10GB disks, and when they run SuSE 9.2 natively, it's so slow it's like pulling teeth. Thus I wanted to help them out by running X and all applications on the server with 512MB RAM instead. (only one laptop will be connected at a time)

-Y1

The X version of client/server always makes my head spin. As I understand it, X runs on the laptop, and apps run from the (physical) server need DISPLAY='laptop:0' set for it to find the remote X server.

Yup, the best way to run X applications off the server is to SSH in, and set the $DISPLAY variable. You'll need a local X server on the client to receive the program and display it. This way, you get your programs tunnelled through SSH, which is ideal if you're going over an insecure network (such as the internet).