Hello all,
I am programmer developer but my expertize is in C/C++ working on mainframe under UNIX. I would like to find out if I can install and run Linux Red Hat 7.0 and/or Mandrake 7.2 on my laptop at home which is HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC. It has Windows7 with 64 bits OS, processor AMD A6-3410MXAPU Radeon HD Dual Graphics, 4.00 GB RAM, 450 GB HD. Can I use also dual boot Win/Linux after that eventually, if I do repartition the HD?
I would really appreciate any suggestion about what and how to do.
Thanks & regards
arwil.

why on earth would you ever want to run Redhat 7.0?? that's just mad. Do you not know it's over TEN YEARS old?? If you're somehow unaware of this, then a modern descendent suitable for a laptop would be fedora 17, although a different distro like mint may suit you better.

Will they work? For RH7, the answer will be no. Not familiar with mandrake but if it's from the same era, the answer is also no.

Reason being that those distros simply don't know about the modern hardware:
SATA, what's that?
USB storage? Hmmm, heard of it but don't know how to handle it.
And so on ...

You probably can get them to work but it will be a massive exercise. If you succeed, you will be one of the most seasoned linux developers here on the forum.

And the other problem is that it is no longer supported; no security patches, no bug fixes etc.

Mandrake 7.2 : Released Oct. 2000.
The latest release is named Mandriva 2011.

The latest "Desktop version" of Redhat is Fedora 17, see post #2.
( Redhat 7.0 released Dec. 2000.)

A 1998 Pentium II computer will do fine with the two ancient OS.

.

I suspect that you are in the possession of branded discs - i.e. retail copies? Back in the day I bought mandrake 9.1, mainly because I was still on 56k. Nowadays most GNU/Linux distributions are downloaded, installed and additional software installed from online repositories. In a nutshell the discs you have belong in a museum - you should try ebaying them - you'd be amazed at what some people collect... I actually managed to sell my old mandrake for a few £££s a few years back. (please disregard this entire post if you bought red hat and mandrake on ebay a few days ago ).

Back of a manual of some sort always seems the most common place for these pieces of history to come from.

I've not seen many distros bundled with books, though I've not bought many books (except the "rute" users tutorial - which is also available free online these days). I vaguely seem to remember some magazines giving away distros (not that I've ever bought any)?

well they're what turns up in a second hand book shop. I think there was a high point around rh6/7/8 where you'd get a "Teach Yourself Linux" book with a cd or two in the back cover. So they now sit in dusty corners of tat shops and people buy them today for £5 thinking they'll give it a whirl.

I have a copy of RH7 and I bought that at a papershop, with my sunday paper, a couple of weeks after it was released at the beginning of this millenia as part of a Red Hat linuc book package. Never was able to get it to work it would install but that was it, never did anything after that.