Installing RHEL on laptop

[nellison4u]

Greetings

I'm a linux newbie.

Can you tell me, if I want to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 for 32-bit x86) on my Acer laptop? Is this possible? I looked on the compatibility list but it seems that I can only install this OS on a server machine? Is that true?

Thanks for you help

[coopstah13]

I don't know where the list you got is from, but you should be able to install it on just about any machine. The easiest way to find out if you can is to download it and try.

[nellison4u]

I will try it and see if it works.

[waterhead]

You will most likely have some hardware problems. The hardware in a newer laptop may have devices that are not supported in RHEL. The most common is wireless and LAN devices, I would expect for those to NOT work.

[Daydreamer]

Can you get a live CD for this OS? Then you can experiment without changing your existing hard disk drive.

Do you have enough disk space to create second hard disk drive partition for a dual boot system? You would need between 10 and 15 Gigabytes to do this (I find that just over 10 Gigabytes is needed for a full development system. I chose 15 to be safe).

Alternatively, you could always buy a second laptop disk drive, and use it for backups as well as experimental partitions. This is my preferred way of upgrading to a new release.

[Mudgen]

If you configure the rpmfusion repos, you can probably get your wireless to work. Why do you want to use RHEL 5 specifically? You'll likely have less hardware difficulty with Fedora, but you may have good reasons for RHEL. If so, also consider Centos, which has at least some community support for use on laptops, and is pretty much rock-solid binary compatible with RHEL. See:
HowTos/Laptops - CentOS Wiki

[RobertBradbury]

I'd go with a LiveCD from Ubuntu or if you want something that forces you to learn Linux to a greater depth Gentoo. Going with a RH Server Linux for a laptop makes no sense at all for Newbies and/or laptops.

Ubuntu is IMO the best for "newbies", e.g. the most automated and idiot proof. It is also likely to deal with the newest and/or atypical hardware. However beware that there are differences in the setup of many Linux versions (the package management utilities are generally different, the latest Ubuntu has created a new Grub format, the system configuration file locations, etc.) tend to vary.

Questions to ask are:
1) Are you maintaining from source or binary packages?
2) How frequent are updates and/or new releases?
3) What is the focus of the distribution? (given that there are dozens of distributions now).
4) What is the support level (forums, phone, etc.) and/or how large is the user community?

One can easily install multiple Linux Distributions but it is better to install them on separate root partitions -- they can all use the same user file partition(s) (e.g. /home). A good size for a Linux root partition is 16 GB, though you could probably make them fit in 8 or 4 GB if you aren't installing too many extra packages.

[meton_magis]

I'd go with a LiveCD from Ubuntu or if you want something that forces you to learn Linux to a greater depth Gentoo.

Ubuntu is IMO the best for "newbies",

If you are trying to learn redhat based systems, or to be similar to RHEL, you'll probably want to avoid ubuntu and gentoo. Gentoo for the obvious reason of that it is TOO configurable, and can vary widely in setup, and ubuntu because it is quite different from RHEL from an administration view.

If you want to be RHEL like, then centOS is the closest to RHEL without having to pay for it, with Fedora being the 2nd best match, but having the advantage of being more compatible with hardware than CentOS (more people working on Fedora than CentOS)

[Feeyo]

If you want to try a different Linux distro that just works out of the box when done with installing give Cronos Linux a try