Help! Install Ubuntu Server to a laptop with a broken screen

[s6long1]

I have a HP Pavilion dv5000 laptop whose monitor has broken. I don't really want to pitch it, so I wanted to know how I might repurpose it to be a file/print server. Ideally, I would like to have it serve my files on my external hard drive, not just my laptop's hard drive.
Ive been using Ubuntu for years now, but I have never set up a server, and i haven't done much with ssh or anything like it either. Can anyone help or point me to a good how-to?

-Steve@deepthought

[JeppeM]

I will be really hard to do without a screen - Do you have the possibility to install an external screen on the laptop which you at least can use while you're setting it up? If that's not possible, i think that installing the Harddisk on another computer with a screen, and then installing the server on the harddisk, and then plugging it back into the laptop... Anyways, if you find a way of doing it, here's a good tutorial which helped us a lot here at office: http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu8.04-lts :)