interested in buying cheap linux laptop

Erik Price eprice at ptc.com
Fri Jul 25 09:41:56 EDT 2003


Hi folks,

I don't have much familiarity with PC hardware, but I'd like to purchase 
a cheap (used, etc) machine to run Linux on.  Since it's for [personal] 
development only, my only performance requirement is that it be capable 
of running a relatively recent Linux with X11 and the development tools 
(GNU, Perl, Python, J2SDK), and hopefully Eclipse (but I can use emacs 
if Eclipse demands too much).  I'm emphasizing affordability over 
performance.  Specifically I'd like to try out the Oracle 9i for Linux 
that was distributed on CD ROM at the quarterly meeting this week, and 
the Oracle application server that came with it.

I prefer a laptop simply because space is scarce and I move around a 
lot, and also so that I can bring it to work (one thing I'd like to do 
is see how easy/difficult it is to migrate my JBoss/Postgres-using 
project to Oracle).  Again, this machine would service no clients except 
maybe from one other computer for testing (so it doesn't need to have 
the hardware to actually run as a server).

Are there any recommendations for area stores that sell decent used 
merchandise, or other hidden deals?  I'm hoping I can find something for 
only a couple hundred bucks, but let me know if that's simply unrealistic.

Thanks,

Erik

PS: also I'm thinking of going with Red Hat since, from what I gathered 
the other night, that'll probably interoperate the most smoothly with 
Oracle software.  Any thoughts on this are welcome too.




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