windows 2000 has terminal services. what is the linux equivalent for this? i already know how to use telnet, but am looking for something gui based... thanks so much for any help.

If you want it to be secure, use SSH and connect to the server with the "-X" option. Depending on connection speed, you might want to use -C for compression. It's probably easiest to use SSH. If you do it the insecure way, you'll have to mess with the DISPLAY variable and probably the xhosts program also. I've used X forwarding over SSH to run Mozilla, and I didn't notice any slowness on a 10/100 LAN. If you have more than only a few clients, CPU usage for encryption and compression might be too much. In that case, you'd have to do it the insecure way.

You could go the whole hog and get Citrix although I think it's only available for Solaris, AIX and HP Unix. Ditto what Jake said....SSH works great for me - much more like citrix, providing seamless windows instead of published desktops (a la terminal swerver). VNC for linux is also much more like TS than the windoze version of vnc as you can have multiple desktops being served at once. If you want windoze clients, you may want to have a look at cygwin, although I have never played with it myself.

If the clients run Windows, Cygwin will open a window for X, which ends up being no better than full-desktop solutions, except for the advantage of security. A security workaround for VNC is to tunnel it over SSH, but that gets complicated.

Try looking at ltsp.org. It's the Linux Terminal Services Project. I installed their packages and followed their instructions and ended up with a diskless computer running Linux off my server. It wasn't that difficult either.

Sorry, that's Linux terminal SERVER project.