I'm looking into converting my old box into a "network drive" of sorts. What I'd like to do is throw it on my LAN after a clean install of the new version of Slack, and have it set up in such a way that I never need any peripherals attached to it. I'd like to do all my administration from a terminal on my windows machine. Anybody have suggestions on where to start? It would also be nice to have a xwindow screen that I can run in XP, so that I can launch one of the desktop environments.

Where do I start? I have plenty of Linux experience, but not much of it is network-oriented.

Hi

If you want a "network drive" for your windows machines just install samba and swaret.

If it's on your local net at home you can allow for telnet control using the windows command prompt as a terminal. Use ftp for extra file transfer goin into other parts of the drive then the windows shares.

All of the above is basicly included in Slackware. You just have to edit your /etc/inetd.conf to allow for connections.

There's quite a bunch of X-terminals for windows-linux that's free for personal use. Look at X-Win32 and WinaXe for example.

Good luck!

X-Win32 and WinaXe are no longer free for personal use but still avaliable as limited shareware.

You can also install cygwin and use that as your X-server but it's a bit trickier to configure.

I think VNC will do exactly what you're looking for.
It is what I use on my own server, so that I have no need of a keyboard/monitor. VNC is essentially a X-like server software that uses the RFB protocol. You start a VNC server on your machine, and it will run a xstartup script that you can adapt yourself to load KDE, or Xfce, of fluxbox, or whatever desktop manager you like.
Then, you can use a vncviewer program (binaries are available for Linux, Windows, Mac) and connect to your VNC server. Voila! X-Window running on your server but controlled in your Windows client!

The only stage in the server's boot process that you cannot see without monitor of course, is the boot process itself... so if your server refuses to start, you'd still have to attach a monitor. But that happens seldom.
Using the VNC service is simple: after installing the software (you can download binaries on realvnc.com), logon to your server using ssh, and run the command vncserver, then logout; the VNC service will keep running.
The very first time it will ask for a password, that you will need to connect to the VNC service later on, when you point your vncviewer to yourserver:1

Cheers, Eric

Thanks for the replies...I'll give these methods a try and see which one works best.