I have looked over previous posts, but was unable to see any threads discussing this particular topic specifically. I am trying to find the best laptop to install RedHat Linux on. I am probably going to install RHEL Server 6.0, since the new RHCSA exam is based on RHEL 6.0, I have access to various older distros. By "best laptop" I mean in terms of ease of installation and overall hardware cooperation. I am not looking for a specific brand or model, just a reliable laptop to easily install and start practicing at home.

Hello fbexec, welcome to LQ,

I don't recommend a specific laptop. But as an advice: here in the forums the most frequent problem people having with their laptop is the wireless adapter. If possible purchase a laptop with a "not recent" hardware.
Second problem is the support for laptopspecific hardware like touchpad and functional keys.
Look at the HCL: http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/ and here http://www.linux-laptop.net/ as well.

Markus

At least one site suggested that IBM Thinkpads seemed to play nice with Linux. I'm not sure if they were referring to a specific model or distro, or were just making a general statement. Have you (or anyone else) heard or experienced anything to support this?

Check Gateway. My two-year-old Gateway T6330 has run perfectly under Mandriva and Ubuntu (64 bit in both cases). It has 3 Gb RAM and powerful enough to run anything (including Windows Vista, which was originally installed on it).

1 members found this post helpful.

I have a thinkpad x100e with AMD/ATI (dualbooting Gentoo and Slackware64), but it is only for mobile use since the 11.6" display is too small for daily work.

But I saw there's a new one (at least here in Germany) with AMD/ATI and 15.6" display (nonglare) and without a preinstalled OS, if I had to purchase a laptop yet, I'd take a look at it. Thinkpads have an excellent keyboard and altogether (with good cause) an excellent reputation.

Markus

yes .

i like gateway also.

i got one m6848 with 4GB rams and never had any issues with it .

only now , when it is a 2 year old has severe problem with the screen , but if i adjust it a little it fixes by itself ..

so yeah gateway are good to go .

also , you might want to check out system76 ...

It's a fact. Linux doesn't yet have all the hardware support of other, more common, operating systems. Check to see if your proposed laptop has good Linux support. If you can't find any references, take note of the hardware in the laptop prior to installation.

Hello,
For me Toshiba laptops works without a hitch for me. Just take a Linux distro, install it, update it and install, if it comes up, locked drivers. It works fine on Tecra, Satellite, Satellite Pro. And you can find them cheap on your local E-bay or similar. Or refurbished retailer. Cheap, reliable and spare-parts from Hong Kong are cheap.

Good luck!
LeopoldB.

I'm going to be pedantic and say it has better hardware support, but less OEM driver support

I've got a Dell 1545, everything works out of the box if you get it with the intel wifi. The intel wifi chips can be found for $15 online, too.

Thanks for all the input and suggestions. I have a semi-related question. Instead of buying a separate laptop to install/run Linux, does anyone have any experience with running Linux on VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion, more specifically on a Mac? I'm not opposed to running it on a Windows-based laptop, so if you have experience with that please share. It would be a newer version of RHEL (probably 6.0, since that what the RHCSA exam covers).

Funny nobody has mentioned the Red Hat Certified Hardware program:

https://hardware.redhat.com/

I was thinking of suggesting that, actually. I run CentOS 5.5 on a VM in VirtualBox, as well as several other flavors of Linux and Windows, Solaris, or whatever strikes me as interesting or necessary at the time. The host system is an HP NC8430 w/3.5 gig RAM running Ubuntu. A 500gb hard drive crapped out on me I had just purchased, and in the process those VMs were lost. Tends to be a reminder to be diligent about backups. It wasn't too difficult to rebuild the machine and create the VMs I use, however.

On a side note, I purchased a hybrid Seagate 500gb drive to replace the failed one. The SSD side of the drive learns the repetitious tasks your system runs, and stores them. It seems to work very well thus far.

The only VM I really use at the moment is the CentOS one. I use it for a web service I wrote that runs on either Tomcat or Weblogic, the web service then directs the incoming data to a backend database through a VPN tunnel to another location. I'm doing some development work in Eclipse on the client for the web service, and having it run on a separate system isolates the processes well enough to mimic a real world environment.

My situation is a little different than yours, as I only need a host for a stable service, which the VM provides very well. Something you will miss is the tangible effect of dealing with the hardware end of an install, although it probably won't be that much different than dealing with CentOS/RHEL on a laptop aside from the fact you'll be encountering issues that aren't likely to be experienced when installing the OS on an actual server.

I don't know what the requirements are for the RHCSA exam, but imagine you should be able to do quite well with a VM. The software is free, so at least trying it won't cost you anything more than a little time.

I did install CentOS on a few netbooks for a business (well, I didn't agree with it, but I wasn't the one making those decisions) along with some development software and an Oracle 11g database. Surprisingly, they ran rather well, far better than I expected. There is a complication where the ethernet NICs installed were not supported by the OS, however, and I had to install the driver manually. This won't be unusual due to the fact those netbooks had something closer to cutting edge hardware, which, when dealing with CentOS, relegates them to bleeding edge. The NICs were Atheros 81XX devices. It isn't hard to install the modules for them, it's just that if the kernel on the machines are updated, the module has to be compiled and installed again. If the netbook is in your possession, that isn't a big deal, but I don't have access at that level to them very often. We just don't update the kernels until I'm there. Could have written a script to check for a new kernel and install the module if it was not found, but figured it wasn't really worth the effort as it isn't often those machines are updated anyhow. I'm not sure why netbooks were even used in this situation, as they are never removed from the LAN. Hell, I'd have used a VM for that application too.

I find VMs to be incredibly useful. To run VMs, you'll need a reasonably capable platform with enough RAM. My CentOS VM has 768 meg of RAM alloted for the VM, and something like 40 gig of hard drive space. Unless you have an application requiring a large amount of storage, the amount you designate is somewhat arbitrary. I just fired up the CentOS VM, and see it is using a little over 200 meg of RAM at boot with tomcat running. There is more RAM being used, but that is for cache, which will adapt to whatever RAM requirements there are.

Good luck!

For what it's worth I have a Compaq Presario F500 with Pclinuxos 2010 kde on it and everything runs fantastically. Haven't tried wireless yet though.

I have had Debian netinstall on it also, Lenny I think, but had issues with sound not working.

Good luck

Hello Ljoki mal,I think you should start your own thread, reported this to be forked.

Markus

Might want to consider supporting one of the fine Linux vendors such as Linux Certified.