[GLLUG] Laptop and RedHat

Matt Graham danceswithcrows at usa.net
Fri Jul 15 09:36:18 EDT 2005


On Friday 15 July 2005 08:44, after a long battle with technology, Alec 
Warner wrote:
> Dave Rogers wrote:
> > I'm considering buying a laptop and setting it up as a dual boot
> > for XP Pro and RedHat.  I'm pretty green when it comes to HW issues
> > and installing RedHat.

You Mean "Fedora Core", right?  Redhat 9 is antiquated, and Redhat 
Enterprise N is overkill.

> > When I buy the system and it has one big partition
> > for XP, will RedHat allow me to partition off a chunk for it during
> > installation or do I need to use some other program to carve out a
> > partition prior to installing Redhat?
> You should be able to use Parted to do this; 

ITYM "ntfsresize" and some sort of partitioning tool.  I believe most 
newbie-oriented distros put good pointy-clicky frontends in front of 
this process if they detect a Windows partition that covers the whole 
disk.

> although honestly I'd wipe it and repartition the drive, then 
> reinstall both. 

This can be overkill, and can waste a lot of time.

> > I'm considering this Compaq laptop:

I've never trusted HPCompaq, but they apparently have a few decent 
models of laptop out there.

> > X6000 Series, P4/520/2.8GHz, 17" WSXGA+ 1680x1050,
> > 512MB DDR2 400, DVD +/-RW/R & CD-RW
> > 64MB ATI X300, 54g wireless
> Wifi drives are often an issue.  Do you have experience with NDIS
> wrappers?  Is the Wifi in that laptop supported natively by the
> kernel? these are good things to check out.

What Alec said about 802.11n.

You should go to http://www.linux-laptop.net/ and possibly 
http://tuxmobil.org/ and look for installation reports on the 
make+model of laptop you will be using.  Also, using 3D acceleration on 
ATi graphics chipsets is kind of a PITA compared to using 3D 
acceleration on nVidia graphics chipsets.  Both require evil 
binary-only kernel modules and X servers, but nVidia's evil kernel 
modules are less troublesome to install.  Usually.

-- 
   Love is a snowmobile racing across the Arctic tundra that suddenly
   flips over, pinning you underneath.  At night, the Ice Weasels come.
   --Matt Groening, "Love Is Hell"
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see


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