Help with everything.

[faulkbeets]

Hello, I am a Senior in high school who is interested in studying Windows and Linux security/technology throughout college. The problem is I have no experience whatsoever with linux. I am confused on what laptop I should invest in (I am looking for a dual boot compatible, ~2GhZ processor, and 40 gig hardrive laptop at an affordable price). I've been reading about the different linux types and I believe i'm going with Red Hat. The linux compatible laptop lists I have seen haven't been very helpful in that the official sites have problems finding the products listed for some reason. I'm wondering if anyone can give me some input on what they think I should do/use.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums, faulkbeets!

I don't own a laptop so can't answer your question directly, but here's another thread about Linux and laptops that you might keep an eye on for any helpful tips:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...-notebook.html

[faulkbeets]

I've been sniffing around with different laptops and so far i'm interested in in a HP pavillion dv5000t with intel core duo processor T2400 or T2500, 1.0GB DDR2 SDRAM (2x512MB), 40 gig hardrive and Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator 950 or 128MB NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) Go 7400. Is all this hardware compatible with linux and if so what brands/versions?

[daark.child]

The best way to find out is to try a few distros and settle on the one that works best on your machine. When I bought my laptop (an Acer Travelmate), Suse worked out of the box with no problems and so did Fedora Core, but some distros don't work smoothly.

[the_music_man]

Watch for proccesors with HT (hyper threading) they are not "supported" with some distros so check the forums for this kind of problems. This happens only to
mobile proccesors with HT. While any distro will work you might have to disable HT - se no point of buying it then - so watch it.