I want to return to Playing with Linux here but want to run it on a separate box.
I haven't chosen any particular distribution (yet) and hopefully that's unimportant for now.
What is a pre-requisite though is to access the Linux PC on a Win2k/XP Pro PC over a lan.

I'm hoping for more than simple ssh or telnet shell sessions (X?) and would like to have fairly good functionality on the Windoze PC in terms of running Linux apps (though not necessarily 3d games etc.).
Preferably the solution would involve free (as in beer) Win software but that's not essential.

Can anyone point me in the right direction pls?

RTFM / Flame-wise i'm hoping for the sympathy vote here and a little gentle advice, if you must Google-Flame please bear in mind your flames won't be read as I'll be too busy on the aforementioned Google

Look for VNC (originally from AT&T labs). It's very similar to PC Anywhere, but it is cross platform and free (as in beer). It also has a java client so you can browse to your server without having to install the client.

Okay, X Windows is the usual GUI involved in most Unices, including Linux. X Windows is networkable, by which I mean that the UI need not be displayed on the computer it's running on. You can get free-ish X servers (the part of the X Windows system that actually displays the UI) for a Windows machine. (My personal favorite is XWin32, which is not really free, but lets you run for up to 2 hours an unlimited number of times.) You can also use ssh to automatically redirect X connections to the machine you're connecting from. It makes it nearly transparent. And you can do any and all of your command line stuff through that ssh session.

If you're not interested in dealing with it that way, there's a protocol called XDMCP (I believe) that allows you to log in via a GUI console as if you were in front of the machine. It still requires an X server.

isn't XWin part of the intel version of Solaris? That is cheap for Solaris but maybe not that cheap just to get XWin.
Oh well, forget I suggested that!

another thought, if you are only after a telnet type session then take a look at Token-2, that gives you all of the full line editing from the pc session and is pretty good & free.

By ``XWin'', do you mean XWindows or XWin32?

XWindows is a network protocol and an API. Both are free of charge, although some implementations (usually non-Unix ones) do cost money. Solaris does have a X Windows server for both SPARC and Intel platforms, as do 99% of Unix-based OSes (Mac OS X is a good example of the 1%).

XWin32 is a non-free commercial XWindows server implementation, but it has a very nice demo usage that very handy for those of us that need an XWindows server on an MSWindows machine for an hour or so once in a while.

(There are also some totally free MSWin32 XWindows servers out there, I think, but I haven't really looked in a while.)

I hadn't seen Token2 before. I'll have to take a look at it, even though it appears to be only telnet. Most real Unix users eschew telnet in favor of ssh these days, since it provides much greater security and a number of new features.

I don't understand, though, what you mean by ``gives you all of the full line editing from the pc session''. Most Unix shells are head-and-shoulders (hell, entire bodies) above MSWindows's command prompt, especially where line editing comes into play. You can get 90% of the features of vi and/or emacs using anything more advanced than sh or csh. In MSWindows's command prompt, I'm not aware that you can do anything more than jump to the beginning and end and switch between insert and replace mode.

nah, what I meant by CL capabilities is all that stuff that is missing if you use M$ telnet or M$ Hypo Terminal, but of course they don't WANT to give you a decent telent, you may use it!!!!
Token 2 is really neat, supports multi windows etc, its not bad for a freebie.
The XWin I mean is the one written by Sun and bundled with Solaris, I checked and it is supplied as part of the Intel version of Solaris, but to get it you have to pay Sun 89 bucks for "media costs".

I've been a Solaris administrator for about ten years, and I have no idea what you're talking about when you refer to XWin, unless you're just talking about XWindows, which is not a Solaris-specific product; in fact, Sun was probably the latest Unix conversion to XWindows -- they were using NeWS up until about 1990.

Regardless, XWindows is the default GUI for pretty much every Unix out there, including Linux.

they were using NeWS up until about 1990


Well sort of, They have had a bunch of different display tech's, but mostly they all ran on top of or concurrent with X.

The display postscript was kind of neat.

Nope. NeWS was totally different than X Windows. There were a few releases where they worked in conjunction, but most of the time it was either X Windows or NeWS. Not both. And display postscript still exists on Sun's X servers. Run xdpyinfo and you'll see it listed as an extension.

crap! I thought I was too young to start getting senior moments.......