Laptops as monitors?

[Axaj]

Well, I have two fairly old laptops, and don't have much of a use for them. On the third, I will be receiving my new Macbook Pro. I was wondering if there was some way to use the laptops as monitors for my new one (if it helps, the are both running Ubuntu 9.04).

[bicostp]

If you can somehow find a USB video input device that works on Linux, yes.

Otherwise? No.

EDIT: OH I thought you wanted to use it a s a screen for a portable or something like that. Sorry, people ask that all the time. There are a few different utilities that can do that on Windows, but I don't know about Linux. Piping X over the network won't really make a second monitor; it will just let the laptop act like a thin client to the desktop.

[nitro2k01]

If the "master" computer was running Linux too, it would be at least theoretically very much possibly to do over the network. Linux is using this nice thing called X which allows disitribution of display signals. I don't know how well or easy it would work in practice though.
You could also try to figure out whether the screens of the laptops are using standard VGA or DVI at some point, but the chances for that are pretty slim. (More likely they're using some proproetary protocol for communicating between the graphics chip and the display.)

[Axaj]

Well, one of them also dual boots into XP.