Can I network mini to cube to share monitor?

Question

I have a Cube (450 MHz) with 15" Apple studio display. I have ordered a Mac mini and now realise that to use the studio display would need a rather large and relatively expensive DVI to ADC adapter.
Is there any way I can network the two computers which will allow me to use the screen with the mini and the cube as the power source for the screen and speakers (with a bit of extra storage and the facility to run some old software).
I can imagine doing it with screen sharing if the cube would run 10.5 but it is too slow.

Answer 1

It should certainly be possible to set the mini up using the TV and DVI/Video adaptor, though in some situations the quality of display could be quite poor for text based screens. It depends on the TV more than anything, but it should be sufficient at least to get the system up and running, and certainly may be good enough for continued use.
However, if I have it connected physically to the cube with firewire and start the cube in target mode will I just get a blank screen?
You won't get any display from the mini onto the screen that way because basically the Cube is just an external hard drive connected to the mini when used in FW target disk mode. The mini will still need it's own display.
Alternatively, if I partition the hard drive of the mini and clone the cube start up disk to start the cube up from the mini can I use VNC to screen share with the mini and would there be any advantage?
You're getting more complex than you need to with that plan! Firstly, since the Cube is a PPC (G4) Mac and the mini is an Intel Mac, you can't mix the two operating systems. They may of course both run the same version of MacOS (not Leopard however since the Cube isn't fast enough) but they are separate PPC and Intel versions for the respective platforms, and one can't use the other.
What you would have to do is set the Cube up as the 'host' and the mini as the 'slave' since the Cube is the system with the display. Thus what you'd be doing is booting both systems, and using VNC on the Cube to open a window onto the mini to show it's output. The problem with this is that it's fairly slow, and much of the performance is limited by the ability of the Cuble to keep up with displaying what the mini is doing. There's also a performance lag because everything you need to do with the mouse and keyboard in effect has to be echoed via the VNC connection to the mini, then the result echoed back to the Cube to be displayed. An ethernet connection would serve much better than a wifi one (100Mbits/sec as opposed to the 11Mbit/sec limit on the Cube's airport) but it is still vastly inferior to having the processor, memory etc on the same bus as the host, directly connected to the display and peripherals.
To be honest, given the cost of modern LCD panels, I'd sell the Cube and display and use the money to pay for (or almost pay for) a good, inexpensive display to work with the mini. In comparison to the Cube, you'll find the mini runs several factors quicker and has far more power and far greater graphics potential. All that would be largely wasted by hosting the mini on the Cube due to the lack of a compatible display.