I have a laptop connected wirelessly to my home network. I'm planning on installing a CentOS server on my network, used for a web server, a file server, and experimentation. I want to access it from my laptop in the form of a dual-boot - one main operating system, and one that's just a very simple system that automatically starts a remote connection to the server and opens up a GNOME session on the server that is then displayed on my computer. I'm thinking about using Arch Linux as the OS which will connect to the server, since I've been meaning to try it for a while and it seems rather configurable.
My questions are the following :
As stated by sarnold, XDMCP should be what you are looking for. However, if "I want my computer to be a 'dumb terminal' " is not a hard requirement, I would encourage you to use NX (implemented, e.g., by FreeNX) instead. It is an improved version of X forwarding over SSH, but it will require a desktop environment on your laptop to run its GUI. However, it has several advantages, mainly bandwidth usage.
That brings us to your second questioN: X forwarding should work fine on a 100 MBit network. Compression will most likely be unnecessary. However, X does take some bandwidth, especially when you have animated content on your screen. So in order to free up your network for other transfers, the low bandwidth needed by NX would help.
Wrt your third question: Well, Arch has a rolling release principle, meaning that there is a continuous stream of updates. It's nice for older machines because it can be tailored so it works perfectly with your machine, and there's good documentation for that. You can definitely make it very slim and efficient, and that will be easier than "trimming down" a SuSE / Fedora / CentOS/... installation. However, if you really only need a dumb terminal, a rolling release system is perhaps less practical than just using a simple Debian installation or something similar, which you can keep on "stable" with minimal updates for a long time.
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