Home network (connecting 2 pc's)

Hi
Recently I bought a new motherboard and assembled a PC.
The config is Intel P4 2.4ghz D845GVSR 256mb RAM,on board sound
card,Dlink external modem.
I used the HDD and cd rom drive of my old pc (a branded IBM PC) for the
new one.
I am dual booting Win XP and Slack 9.1 on the new pc.

Now I have this old pc as a spare PC for which I bought a HDD(40 gb)
and also got a crossover cable.

old pc config
This Pc has a config of Celeron 500mhz 64mRAM 40gb HDD
No CDrom
No floppy drive.
I want to connect these two PC's
My questions.

1.Can I make this old PC a linux only box (dual/triple boot Linux only)
and connect to my dual boot new PC. this means that my primary
partition should be linux native.

2.If option (1) above is possible then how do I load linux in this PC
which has no Cd rom/floppy drive.

3.Which distro will be suitable as a primary distro. (i do not have
problem if
there is no GUI am comfortable with CLI)

4.Alternatively I can create a Fat32 partition and load may be Win
98SE.

Any replies would be appreciated.

Thanks
Ninad Bapat

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> Now I have this old pc as a spare PC for which I bought a HDD(40 gb)
> and also got a crossover cable.
> No CDrom

> 1.Can I make this old PC a linux only box (dual/triple boot Linux only)

Yes.

> and connect to my dual boot new PC.

Yes.

> this means that my primary
> partition should be linux native.

Why? You can have the entire disk as an extended partition if you really
want to. GNU/Linux bootloaders don't care.

> 2.If option (1) above is possible then how do I load linux in this PC
> which has no Cd rom/floppy drive.

Three options that I can see:
* Buy a cheap CD-ROM drive, or put back the existing one. Then
install "as normal"

* Move the HD across to your new PC and install "as normal"

* Maybe your older PC supports network boot, in which case
you can go through the pain of setting up TFTP and a network
bootloader/kernel. Not recommended unless you /really/ want or
need to avoid swapping hardware.

Chris

> 3.Which distro will be suitable as a primary distro. (i do not have
> problem if
> there is no GUI am comfortable with CLI)

If you're a Slack user then stick with Slack. There's not a lot of point
(IMO) in running multiple distributions.

> 4.Alternatively I can create a Fat32 partition and load may be Win
> 98SE.

That doesn't address any of your previous requirements/questions, and
sidesteps the issue of how you'd install Win98. If you can install Win98
you can install a GNU/Linux distribution.

Chris

> * Buy a cheap CD-ROM drive, or put back the existing one. Then
> install "as normal"
This is probably easiest; if you put back the CD-ROM drive you can
remove it once you have finished installing.
>
> * Move the HD across to your new PC and install "as normal"
This will work. You don't need to do an install - just copy the
existing system over - but setting the boot loader up might be tricky,
and the X11 configuration will be wrong.

Another alternative is to borrow a floppy drive and do a network install.