> 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
