Remote controlling a computer

This might sound extremely weird, thank you for your patience.

Situation: (I have a....)
- laptop
- keyboard and mouse
- an old computer (about 8 years old, has network card, has video card, has cd rom)

I want to install linux onto that old computer (to run as a server). The most obvious problem is that I do not have a monitor. Is there any way for me to somehow access the old computer from my laptop? Please note that I will be formatting the computer and installing linux from scratch. On the laptop, I also run linux on VMware with the host being windows.

Thank you very much.

 

The problem would be that I not do have an OS installed on the computer yet...

 

Boot to a Gentoo Live CD. You can then start the SSH daemon and access it that way.

If you are using Windows, you'll want to install the OpenSSH client.