CentOS Laptop

Nefarious · 14 Sep 2008 at 22:08

I'm trying to practice my RHEL (apparently they hate the use of this acronym) so want to have CentOS on a laptop.

I have a Dell Latitude with eSATA and was thinking of trying to boot off an external drive so could have a plug-in CentOS as and when I like but am unsure as to how well CentOS will deal with the laptop's hardware - how good are their driver sets?

mattgaunt · 15 Sep 2008 at 12:06

I dont know much about centOS I only use it on my Uni workstation but if centOS has a liveCD just boot off of that to see if the hardware works, if the liveCD has major issues then that might give you a little hint of the trouble ahead. Alternatively you have quite well known laptop so maybe just ask in a centOS forum or google and I'm someone else will reply giving you some guidance :-)

sidethink · 15 Sep 2008 at 12:38

A Centos Live CD can be downloaded from here for example:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/mirror.centos.org/5.2/isos/i386/

You can then check if your hardware is all detected.

FirebarUK · 15 Sep 2008 at 13:11

I'd never put CentOS on a laptop (modern one), as the hardware support simply won't be much good out of the box (typically).

You'd be better off keeping Windows on the laptop and running CentOS in a virtual machine.

AndrewP · 15 Sep 2008 at 19:46

Fedora would be worth a go, I like its combination of similarity to CentOS/RHEL and more frequent updates - good for a workstation or desktop.

Nefarious · 15 Sep 2008 at 22:20

FirebarUK said:
I'd never put CentOS on a laptop (modern one), as the hardware support simply won't be much good out of the box (typically).

You'd be better off keeping Windows on the laptop and running CentOS in a virtual machine.

I'm running it on an eSATA drive so will only have it on there to play. I've gotten hold of a wireless card that will work and the rest will have to do.

Thanks for all the advice and recommendations.