[Sussex] SPARCBooks, Powerbooks and bog standard laptops

[The ol' tealeg]

Chaps,

Does anyone know of a company currently manufacturing SPARC based
laptops other than Tadpole and NextCom - I'm looking to find the best
price I can for such a beast, probably bear minimum is UltraSparc IIi @
500Mhz unless anyone knows of a particularly good price on a lower spec
box.

Currently I'm weighing up my options for new 'puters, whatever happens I
know these things aren't going to be cheap, but for my needs they are
probably better suited than some P4 Dell laptop.

My thinking right now is this: buy a decent laptop and a cheap (probably
mini-itx) box  - the laptop will be the main machine, the mini-itx will
sit on the end of my ADSL line and provide me with a point for the
distribution of data.

Of course, if we step away from the practical consideration we have to
consider geek-chic here, so straw poll, what's cooler?:

32-bit Dell Laptop - Dual boot Gentoo Linux and QNX RtP
32-bit Apple Powerbook G4 - Dual boot Mac OSX and Gentoo Linux	
64-bit Tadpole SPARCBook 5000 - Dual Boot Solaris 9 and Gentoo Linux

Personally the SPARCBook comes top of my list, it doesn't look as cool
as the Apple, but frankly that's the least of my concerns.

As far as OS X is concerned - yeah, it's very cool, but it doesn't feel
right to me, is sort of a weird Mac OS / UNIX hybrid.  My wife loves it,
but these days I'm gravitating more and more towards the command line
(the UNIX is growing in me..) and OSX has too many weird quirks in that
respect to keep me happy.

The Dell box is probably the most practical decision (especially as
Sarah's new firm act for them and she can get a decent discount), but it
doesn't really float my boat right now..


-- 
-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk 
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"Life was simple before World War II, 
after that we had systems"
	- Grace Murray Hopper

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