Re: Laptop Recommendations?

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 20:26, bja@Illinois.DynDNS.Org wrote:
> I'll be going off to school next year and am looking for laptop
> recommendations. Basically, my only requirements are that it support some
> type of functional UNIX or a compatible system and do it in a completely
> native way (no loading windows drivers through a compat layer; that scares
> the crap out of me) (excluding the 56k modem which is almost never
> supported and I don't plan on using it anyway) and it cost $2,000 or less.

Hard to find in a PC Notebook anymore.  So many PC OEMs are being so
proprietary with their notebooks, selling at cost and then making the
money back on accessories with massive mark-ups.

The only ones I've seen that are Linux compatible are the lightweight,
low-power (but possibly underpowered) ViA C3-based notebooks, and
possibly a few AMD reference designs that a few vendors used.

Another thing that annoys me about PC Notebooks is the performance on
battery.  Who cares if you have a 2.4GHz+ if it only runs at 800MHz on
battery!  That's where the "M" versions are actually not bad.   Heck, an
older P3-based notebook is often just as fast on battery  as a P4-based
one.

> I've been looking at the 12.1" Apple Powerbook with 768Mb of RAM, Airport
> Extreme (802.11g), and iSight. Any equivilents in x86 land?

Not really.  I'm actually waiting on the PowerPC 970 / G5 notebooks. 
The PowerPC 970 is designed to use 19-22W at 1.2-1.4GHz in portables,
versus 42-50W at the desktop 1.6-2.0GHz.  Unfortunately IBM is still
having a few yield problems, so their workstation and Apple's G5
desktops have the priority right now.

It would be nice to have a nice, 64-bit 1.2GHz G5 that outperforms PC
notebooks that are on battery 2:1.  But IBM can't seem to get the yields
to happen in quantity.

> I don't know if I want to use a Mac because I've grown very used to my
> customized KDE with Kontact, Konqueror, Karamba, etc and it seems like a
> waste to buy a Mac and not use OS X (and Yellow Dog doesn't seem to
> support the latest generation of Powerbooks).

Er, um, what about Fink ( http://fink.sourceforge.net )?

Isn't KDE on MacOS X now _native_ c/o Qt/Mac because it is now available
as GPL by TrollTech (since last June)?  Or has the native Qt/Mac version
of KDE not been released, and Qt/X11 is still the one included with
Fink?  In either case, KDE is running on MacOS X _now_.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I. -- Engineer, Technologist, School Teacher
b.j.smith@ieee.org



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