Recently, I bought a second hand computer in an online store. A Dell Optiplex gx240 with a Pentium IV 1.6 GHz, 20 GB hard drive and 256 MB of RAM. I had some spare parts from an old broken PC, so I upgraded it to 512 MB of RAM and replaced the hard drive with a 40 GB one. Not exactly a state of the art computer, but cheap and good enough for what I wanted. This computer would be connected 24/7, with an ssh server and a VNC server running to control it remotely (no need for a keyboard or screen to use it). My main goals were being able to transfer files between other computers of my LAN, downloading big files (like Linux distros) without needing to have one of my "good" PCs connected many hours, and, in general, experimenting with Linux.

The Operating System I chose was Xubuntu, a lighter version of Ubuntu, my favorite GNU/Linux distro, great for old computers with limited resources (although, in my case, Ubuntu would have probably worked perfectly too). The first thing I did was installing the latest version of Xubuntu (7.04, Feisty Fawn) in the computer. It was quite easy, even more given I did a fresh installation (no dual boot in this computer or anything like that). I had a problem though, I had the bad luck to experience an strange bug in the installation process of this version of Xubuntu, during the partitioning, but I found the solution at launchpad.net (the error was something like "The ext3 file system creation in partition name of the partition failed", it seems that the ext3 file system creation on one partition always failed 'cause Thunar, the file manager, was auto-mounting the partition, so I had to reconfigure it not to do that). The only thing I wasn't sure about (although I checked it with the livecd before I installed the OS) was if Xubuntu would recognize my usb wifi adapter, but I had no problem at all, Xubuntu detected it perfectly.

With Xubuntu running, it was time to install the ssh and VNC servers. Installing the ssh server was really easy, I went to synaptic and selected the "open-ssh" package. For the VNC one I found a great tutorial at bit-tech.net (indeed, this tutorial also explains a lot of things I had done or wanted to, including the installation of Xubuntu and the ssh server, and some other interesting stuff like samba or an FTP server... great tutorial), the author of the article uses the x11vnc server, which allows you to remotely access an existing X server session, and that is exactly what I needed. So I followed the easy instruction of that tutorial and, in a moment, the VNC server was up and running.

Now I already could disconnect the screen from the computer and access it (securely if needed) from any PC of my LAN.

In next posts, I'll explain how I've used Firestarter to configure my firewall to, for example, close the ssh and VNC ports to everyone except the computers on the local network; how I'm able to access the computer from my Palm PDA or how to configure Filezilla on a Windows PC to transfer files from/to the computer using sftp.