hey,

I was wondering, if I was to buy a second hand laptop to run Red Had 9, how old a laptop could I get? I know any petium class processor is supported and ~128MB RAM is recommended with maybe a 10GB HD to be comfortable, but is there anyhing else I should watch out for or know?

Obviously it would not only need to be good enough to support Red Hat, but also any other applications I later install and try to run (not including games obviously).

Thanks,
Gearoid

I partially depends on what you plan to run on that 'new' laptop.

It's obvious from your post that games are out, but what about other apps that rely (heavy) on graphics? If you want to run KDE(2/3) for example, or edit pictures (not to mention movies) you need more then the 128 Mb you mentioned, also a good graphics card and a cpu as fast as you can afford........

If you choose to use a lightweight windowmanager (an example being xfce) and want to surf the web, program, text edit, stuff like that you can do with a PII 233 with 128 Mb Mem and 20 Gb hd. If you have to make the choice between a bigger HD or more memory, I would choose a memory upgrade. But you might encouter moments that you wished that your box had a little more power.

Make sure that all the components inside the laptop will work with linux. 'win'-hardware (winmodem to name one) aren't (there are some exceptions and they are 'working on it') supported under linux. You could choose a pcmcia modemcard instead.

Just my 2 cents.