Linux on a Laptop

I've dabbled with Linux before, but this time I think it may be serious. Why? Because I have this little old Gateway 600 laptop and it occured ot me that it is the near-equal of my main desktop computer. So why shouldn't it be able to run Linux?

I downloaded Red Hat v9, burned the CD's, put the first one in the laptop's CD drive and...voila, it runs. Not a single install or operational issue so far. The only feature I haven't tried yet is the wireless NIC. The onboard wire NIC is eth0, and the wireless shows as eth1, so the system recognizes it, even correctly ID's the hardware, so sometime this week I'll give it a shot.

I had a brief issue creating a FAT16 partition that would allow me to move files from the Windows XP side to the RH Linux side. Seems that users under Linux couldn't mount the partition, while the root (superuser) account could. Only root didn't have permission to modify the permissions. Weird. A one minute search via Google provided the answer, the correct syntax to add to the fstab file, and voila, problem solved.

(fstab is the file the system parses on boot to tell it how to mount what filesystems -- drives and drive partitions. The line I had to add was "/dev/hda6 /mnt/fat vfat users,noauto,umask=000 0 0". Don't ask me -- yet. It just works.)