> And since OS X is BSD-based, a lot
> of that linux experience carries right over
this is true...several times I have needed to fix things that the
fabulous GUI and included tools in 10.2.x and 10.3.3 would not let me
do. I just enabled the root user and went in and fixed them from a
shell. a good bit of the common tools we all use are included there.
> and it's a hellofa lot
> easier than finding a laptop that will easily run linux.
>
It's the sad state of laptop hardware that makes me even mention it. I
> spent several months shopping for a new laptop that I could run linux
> on and still wound up with a Dell that locks up about twice a day for
> no particular reason. It's not that any of the hardware isn't
> supported; in fact all the hardware in it is extremely well supported
> by linux. It's just that it's a PoS laptop. Maybe I should have known
> better with Dell, but as it was, it was one of three models that a) I
> could afford and b) had hardware that was fully supported by linux.
> Everything else was either ridiculously expensive or had some component
> (firewire, USB, PCMCIA, video) that was some oddball manufacturer/model
> that made me doubt I could get linux running on it reliably or at all.
>
> And yeah my powerbook was more expensive than the dell, but after the
> fact, when I consider the amount of time I've spent unsuccessfully
> trying to get linux stable on the Dell, and the amount of stress it's
> caused me considering how much I did spend on it, and how it still
> locks up randomly whenever it feels like it, I wish I had just bought
> the powerbook to begin with.
this may be a hassle for some but seems to be a little overdone as a
statement. linux distro flavors seem to have more quirks between them
than the more recent hardware in my experience. obviously within reason
that the bleeding edge hardware takes some additional time.
I'm writing this from a 3 month old DELL Inspiron 5150 P4 2.6 GHz 768 MB
DDR running SuSE 9.1 that previously ran 9.0. All hardware including
firewire, USB, Touchpad, Sound, Battery/Charging recoginition and more
worked flawlessly from the box. the only piece of hardware I had to
tinker with was the Dell truemobile b/g wireless card. I ended up after
an hour or so getting it up and running with the OEM driver and
ndiswrapper. it's a little bulkier than some of the others, but my
needs were more of a Desktop replacement that I could take everywhere.
the side effect of the bulk is that it's sturdy. no flex or torque to
the case. It's solid. I have yet to have SuSE crash on it, ever.
>
> The difficulty in getting a laptop running linux anymore
> was more than enough to drive me to Apple. And frankly, I really like
> my powerbook and OS X now that I've used it for a while.
>
I too am growing more fond of mac in the past two years and also after
our recent purchase at the office of several dual cpu G5's. The
engineering is spectacular and you gotta love the BSD Based core. The
exception is the lack of a "graphic design/animation" class graphics
card. all you can get is 9800 radeons. the biggest nvidia is 64MB. too
bad. this has actually pushed us to run Quadro FX 3000's on linux
boxen. I'm starting to get O/T so I'll stop now. :^)
Mike Branda
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