Laptop related issues

[Ken Scott]

On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 15:45, Chuck Campbell wrote:
> I'm considering a laptop, and I've been doing research on what works and
> what doesn't.  As far as I can tell, there is no easy way to do this, other
> than;
> 
>  1)Buy what someone else has, and follow their steps for making it all work.
>  2)Buy what ever you want, and work on making it all work (this means living
>    with parts that do NOT work).
> 
> Given all of that, and not asking what to buy, I still have a couple of 
> questions :
> 
>  1)I need to connect to switches, raid boxes, etc. using a serial port.
>    Will usb ports work for this (few new laptops w/ serial ports) using
>    a converter cable?  If so, what terminal emulation s/w under Linux
>    will talk over the usb port to these kinds of devices?  Put another
>    way, can a usb port be configured and talked to as com[1-4]?
> 
>  2)Are there any issues w/ RH9 and/or FC-1 and XFree86 on WUXGA displays?
>    Is this really a function of XFree86 and/or graphics drivers? 
> 
>  3)Anyone have any experience running RH9 / FC-1 as a base OS, and using
>    VMWare to host a WinXP pro OS as well?  Does VMWare run happily on the 
>    RH9 / FC-1 host OS?
> 
> thanks,
> -chuck
> 
> 

As a newbie I can't help much but what I did when I decided to get a
Linux capable laptop was took a live-CD (Knoppix I believe) to the
Staples store and booted up the machine of interest and put it through a
number of paces (sound, mouse, screen drivers,  etc).  It helped some
although there are still a few issues.  I have no experience with
VMWare.
Good luck 
Ken