Hi David,
A laptop is a very personal choice, I for example choose portability
over firepower, a Fujitsu P5010 until recently (some 12 hours of battery
life and very very small), and now a Sony Vaio. The Fujitsu was OK with
Linux, and I've not yet tried it on the Vaio, as it has only 40GB HD
which at the moment cannot be increased, it's a new type of ultrasmall
drive.
You may want to look for some models you like and be comfortable with,
and then check this site out
http://www.linux-laptop.net/
where you can find out how tricky and what caveats you'll find in
installing Linux on those particular models. Some newer ones may not be
listed, so googling usually gets you some pointers too.
Best regards,
Mike
David Bouchard wrote:
I am about to be purchasing a laptop and I was wanting the advice of the
list. I know this can be a very personal topic for some people, but I have
to throw it out there anyway.
Here's my situation...I'm about to be attending a degree program in
Information Assurance and Forensics. I also have my own business doing a
variety of things computer related. At some point I would like to delve
more heavily into vulnerability assesment, penetration testing, and possibly
forensics. I'm looking for a laptop that will be flexible enough to meet
all these needs.
This is what my immediate plans for the laptop are: for my business, I need
to have some of the basic MS Office suite on it, as well as MS Publisher. I
plan on making it into a dual-boot machine with some flavor of linux. I
don't care to use a live linux CD because I want to be able to store logs,
settings, and other data onto the drive, and I hope to eventually use linux
for everything except the MS stuff that I have to use on occasion for my
business.
Because of the variety of things I plan on doing, I want to get one that has
a serial and a parallel port in addition to the USB that they pretty much
all come with now. It would be nice to have at least one PCMCIA slot as
well. I plan to do some wireless network assessment, so it needs to be
wireless capable, but for my purposes being able to attach an external
antennae for extra range isn't that important.
What I'm looking at right now is the Dell Latitude D600. I've supported and
purchased a lot of Dell desktop computers and have been very happy with them
and I have run Knoppix-STD on a Dell laptop and everything ran well. The
D600 has the ports I'd like.
Any thoughts or recommendations? Any capibilities that you think I've
missed?
Thanks,
David
