Re: laptop budget, need advice
> Hello again,
>
> I've got a budget of =< $2000 (US) for a laptop through a new employer.
> Due to job requirements, I need to run RedHat and windoze (preferably NT) in
> addition to Debian. I also need to do some presentation work on the laptop.
>
> Any suggestions for the closest to 100% compatible laptops?
Well, NT has fairly stringent hardware requirements, so chances are pretty
darn good that if NT can take it, so can we. The main issue will be the
video chipset, since evry manufacturer looking to rake in a buck seems to
be willing to cough up an MSwin driver.
With that said, what you'll definitely need is some disk space, although
you can reasonably set a D: drive / vfat filesystem as your /home volume
under both Debian and RedHat, thus saving some space and solving a little
of the schizophrenic feeling you're likely to have. Debian and RedHat can
also share swap very nicely. Further than that, and you're getting a bit
into customizing and further from the distribution bases, which might not
suit your business needs.
If the job requirement is merely to use RPMs, Debian can do that too;
you just need to install that package, is all. Also, there is a K desktop
util that claims to be a comfortable front end for both .debs and .rpms
which you might want to get your hands on.
You might find VMware suited to your needs to run Windows, hard to say;
also hard to say whether that would save space or cost extra.
Perhaps it would be best to get something with a hot swappable hard drive,
then you can have a small stack of swap-me's with every OS version they
want to have you using. Not quite as cool as taskswitching between them,
but perhaps easier than making the effort to have them live together, if
you're going to reboot a lot.
Magicpoint is a pretty cool presentation tool for Linux! Get the .deb near
you! :)
* Heather
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