Hi,

I hope this is the right place to offer some help with my mission. I just bought a 2nd-user Dell server with 384MB RAM and P3 600MHz processor to use as home-network storage/media server. While I wait to get a monitor from somewhere, is there any way I can use a Knoppix CD (either remastered or making use of the persistent config or persistent home-dir functionality) to boot the unit, connect to the local network's ethernet router by DHCP, and launch an SSH (maybe even NX) server? I have two laptops (one Gentoo, one WinME) available on the network, and the main aim is to explore the hardware of the box (I don't know too much what's in there) prior to installing an OS.

Can anyone advise what I'd need to go about this? I have seen some posts about headless Linux searching here and elsewhere, but no actual howto that (a) still exists or (b) explains what it actually does. I currently have: a keyboard (so I could enter cheatcodes blind?); a USB key (for config outside the CD, if it can be accessed automatically); a Knoppix 3.7 CD and a ParallelKnoppix CD. (I heard about ParallelKnoppix in one of the threads my search turned up here, but I can't find any documentation telling me whether it will suit my exact needs.)

Thanks in advance!