Linux

Hello, everyone

I am new linux user. Yes, what I mean by that is I am totally new, never touch linux before. Only have one year experience of Solaris.

Anyway, I have to learn it because eventually I am going to use it at work.
Here is my question:

can I buy a cheap netbook (like less than 300 dollars ) and run Red Hat on it? What kind of brand I should consider or it really does't matter? Is there anyway to buy a netbook without OS so I can load Red Hat myself?

Thanks

You can't run Red Hat (for free anyway) but you can run CentOS or Fedora on it. Fedora is to Red Hat what OpenSolaris is Solaris. You You can probably find a cheap netbook with Ubuntu on it if you don't want to pay an OS tax. You could run RHEL if you want to pay for it but CentOS is free. CentOS is essentially RHEL with all of the Red Hat specific tools yanked out. If you are going to be using RHEL in production it wouldn't be a bad investment to pay the $80 US to get the real deal.

Your other options to learn this is to use a virtualized environment. If you have a decently fast CPU (Preferably dual or dual core or better) and >1GB RAM on your machine, I would recommend it.

I used to use VMware server but have switched to virtualbox. That is freely downloadable and you can then use your computer running any variant of Linux, a recent version of Windows or even Solaris or Mac (both x86) as a host to your virtual linux machine.

Installing Linux on any brand-new laptop is often an exercise in frustration. Laptops tend to have the strangest hardware, and the linux world will have had about as much time to explore how to get everything working on it as you have -- after all, brand new. Some kinds of netbooks even come with linux on them, but manufacturers rarely bother getting anything but the bare rudiments of it operating, treating it like the throwaway OS they'd put on a no-OS machine.

So, research any purchase thoroughly before you make it.