HEELLPP!! Installing RedHat in a Laptop

ok.. here's the scenario

i saw a nice laptop in a shop and im planning to buy it.. but the prob is that it has Windows XP on it.. so im thinkin of just Installing Red Hat and get rid of the WinXP..

has anyone installed Red Hat on a laptop? how hard or easy was it? what are the things i should watch out for when i install the Red Hat in the WinXP laptop?..

is there anything i should take note like the name of the Video card, sound card or anything?

what are the pro's and con's in installing RedHat in a laptop?

i don't see any problem but having ur required drivers ... thats all ..

what is the laptop brand ...

ask them for the drivers ... or download it from the company web site..

If you have little experience with installing Linux and don't really know (like me) how to find and install extra drivers, that's really no problem... But you might have to sacrifice your Red Hat for another distro.

I was just in the same situation like you, I bought one of those brand new laptops with a 'designed for winxp' sticker on it. It turned out Red Hat didn't work out of the box, neither did Suse. Then I tried Mandrake, which worked fine.

IMO it's quite easy to customize the Linux even for a newbie. The really useful apps come with all the distros, and the GUI is easy to change. So there aren't really much difference between RH, Suse and Mandrake. So don't bother the hassle finding the updated drivers etc, just find another distro. Sure one of them are gonna work on your laptop.

hmm .. .. btw, does eterm run on Mandrake or Red hat?

Runs on Mandrake!

haha then Mandrake it is,
BTW is Mandrake a resource HOG??

I don't think so. In the installation phase you can disable all of the server functionality that is resource hungry, webserver, databaseserver etc. But to run eterm you will need a graphical environment and I think some of them require a lot of resources. A new laptop should have no problem with running Mandrake, though. It's by far faster than winxp, and require fewer resources also. :) IMO winxp is the REAL resource hog.

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Originally posted here by proactive
If you have little experience with installing Linux and don't really know (like me) how to find and install extra drivers, that's really no problem... But you might have to sacrifice your Red Hat for another distro.

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One of the first distro's I ever installed on a laptop was RH. And it's fairly easy and straightfoward. I just recently installed RH 7.2 on my panasonic laptop without any problem.

What you might run into issues with, s0nic, is if you have a pcmcia card. I ran into minor issues with a Xircom card previously (there are no supported Linux drivers) and eventually got it to work with some 3com ones I think.

It really shouldn't be that much different than when you install Linux on a desktop.

He Aussie boy, look at www.mobilix.org first, see if the same laptop is on their site and if anybody else has any experience with installing RH on it.

I run RH 7.2 on my laptop. I didn't have a problem with anything except the win modem. I currently run a Xircom 56k/ 10/100 ethernet combo card without a problem. Never had any issues with that. I just did the standard laptop install, and it did everything else on its own. Not sure what kind of problems proactive was having. I have installed Redhat, Suse, Debian, and Slackware all on laptops. Slack was the only one that gave me any problems, but that was eventually worked out also. The only reason I run redhat now is because of the ext3fs, which kicks ass. As far as I know, RH is the only distro that completely supports it right now.

eterm...now theres one for you. That runs on x-windows. Doesn't matter what distobution of linux you have, as long as you install x. I believe you need the kde or enlightenment libs to run it, but I don't remember exactly. I know it originally ran just on enlightenment. I haven't run it in quite a while, but it used to be a major memory hog. Haven't tested the latest verson though. I just started running aterm, and that was fine.