I'll start with a little background info: I just moved into the University of Arizona dorms about 2 weeks ago, but I'm going to be going home every once in a while on the weekends. My desktop is at the dorms, along with a recently acquired 4th hand tablet PC, but I kept my laptop at home (too heavy to bring to classes, too slow to replace my desktop).
What I want to do is be able to transfer files from a 160 GB external drive attached to the laptop over the internet to and from my desktop at the dorm. That way I'm not left with out of date files/music on my laptop or desktop, and they can be synchronized. I think that can be done if I set up my laptop as a file server?
Right now I have Windows XP on the laptop, but I've been meaning to put Ubuntu (actually, probably Kubuntu) on it, and I figure that would make a lot of this file server business easier.
Eventually I would like to be able to at least SSH into the laptop, or preferably (if it's possible/practical) to be able to see/manipulate my actual desktop as if I were there (the terminal is nice, but clicking on things is nicer).
So, does anyone know how to do this, or know of a good tutorial for this kind of thing? I saw a really great tutorial for doing this, but I cant seem to find it again... Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated! :]