I'm purchasing a new laptop, a HP Compaq 8710w Mobile Workstation
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.6 GHZ, 800 mhz, 4mb L2 cache
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1600M Graphics controller with 512 MB
4GB of ram
250GB 5400 rpm SATA Hard Drive
DVD+/-RW (Still might go with the blue ray drive)
Intel 802.11 a/b/g/draft-n WiFi

My plan is to installed Red Hat Enterprise 5.0 with Vmware Workstation in order to run windows in a Virtual Machine with only the necessary Windows Apps I still need to use.

Also I been hearing a lot about CentOS, which is basically Red Hat Enterprise 5 Workstation Multi OS version only free with the Red Hat Logo's removed.

So my question, is it really worth it to purchase a subscription from Red Hat compared to getting CentOS for free.

I'm looking hear from others on their mobile experiences with RHEL 5 or CentOS.

My areas of interest
Wifi connections
Joining a windows domain or connections to windows resources (printers and shares)
Hibernation


Gerald

You are basically buyig first rate support from RedHat. If you don't need the support, I would go with CentOS (and maybe send them a few bucks).

That is the main question I'm trying to answer for myself. Do I need first rate support with quick turn around, or can I get what I need from the community and forums when I'm in a jam.

I've used Fedora since 3 extensively at home and a small server at work. I'm moving away from Windows on the workstation to Red Hat or a Red Hat derivative. I want to make sure I can get set up quickly and efficiently with Red Hat in a windows environment. When I say windows environment I mean, that we have a Windows XP server that functions as a domain server, printer server and file server. We also have 2 Linux servers were we do oracle and C development. We mainly access these servers via telnet or VNC.

I can connect to our windows network from home via VPN using PTPP on Fedora. But I'm taking it to the office direct and would like to be able to login to the the domain from Red Hat.

I plan to write scripts to mount the windows NTFS shares and connect to office printers automatically.

I also plan to install Evolution and it connect to Exchange 2003 for mail

Since I travel I want to make sure that wireless works, such as being able to list the current wireless hubs in the hotel or airport and choose which one to connect to.


Personally I would like to change over our entire setup to Linux and just run the very few windows applications we access on a Virtual machine running Windows XP. We do more on Linux and Unix then anything else. We only use MS small business because this is where my bosses came from.

My laptop arrives at the end of this month and I'm doing as much research as I can before then to aid in my setup. My bosses are skeptical, but not entirely opposed to the idea of moving from Windows to Linux, I just need to convince them that this is actually a better move for us.

Sounds like a qn only you can answer: how confident do you feel about Linux, specifically RH style, and do you have good bookmarks for help on the net eg here?
Maybe you should get official RHEL for 1 yr and see how you go. If it's all good, let it lapse and use Centos for updates. Not sure if you'd have to re-install, Centos is RH without the logos etc, so it ought to be fine...