hi there,

i have an older pc (celery 1.1ghz) which i'd like to use as a dedicated bittorrent box. preferably, i'd like to keep it in somewhere out of sight, and vnc in via ethernet. as it's quite old, xubuntu will be a good choice.

how would i go about doing this? are there guides to help setup a linux box without keyboard/display/mouse? has anybody been able to do something like this?

You would be much better off setting the machine up with TorrentFlux and straight Debian rather than just trying to run normal BT clients on an Ubuntu box over VNC.

The easiest way to set up a linux box like that is to start off with a keyboard/display/mouse and then simply disconnect the keyboard/display/mouse after you have it set up the way you want. The local X server will fail, because by default it will fail when there's no keyboard or no mouse attached--but you don't really care about this because you're not logging into it locally anyway.

But before that, the BIOS might complain even before bootup that no keyboard is attached. Some really old motherboards will absolutely refuse to boot up without a keyboard. Your 1.1Ghz Celeron should be new enough that there's a BIOS option to not halt on any errors (by default, it's probably set to halt only on keyboard errors--so you'll need to change it).

How much RAM does this computer have? Can you even install xubuntu on it?

good point, i will take a look the bios to see if its capable of what you say.

the pc has 384mb ram. xubuntu is meant for low powered pc, no? i did manage to get 6.x running on it just to test the possibility.

wow, thanks for the pointer! i wasn't even aware of that piece of software! i just took a quick look at http://www.torrentflux.com/, and like you say, it looks like a more convenient way of doing things. does it only run on debian? does it need any special setup after getting the requried distro up and going? questions questions questions ...

384megs of RAM is plenty for any version of Ubuntu or Debian.

No, it will run on any distribution. I have had good luck running it on Slackware, myself.

I only say Debian because it will be a little easier to get a streamlined and efficient Debian install than with Ubuntu. In Debian, the base install is going to be very light. Even with Xubuntu, the base install is going to include software you would not need to run TorrentFlux, with X and XFCE themselves being the main things (plus all the graphical desktop applications that you obviously won't be using anyway).

Not to say that you couldn't just install Xubuntu and strip all of that out, because you certainly could, but it would just be more work you need to do to get the machine setup. Personally I try to keep my systems are light and efficient as possible, but to each his own.

As for actually configuring TorrentFlux, there are a number of guides out there for it which should walk you through the whole setup. Here is one for Ubuntu. It might look a little daunting, but just take your time and you shouldn't have any problems. Not all of those steps are required either, when going through the guide you should be able to determine which steps actually apply to you, it is explained pretty well.

thanks for the info! i think i'll stick with xubuntu for now since i'm more familiar with it. perhaps later when i get more confident, i'll venture into a more efficient debian install

speaking of which, which distro has the lightest system requirements an application like what i'm trying to accomplish?