[Sussex] SPARCBooks, Powerbooks and bog standard laptops

[Neil Ford]

On Wednesday, January 15, 2003, at 11:48  pm, The ol' tealeg wrote:

> 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.
>
I have a friend who's into this kind of stuff, I'll pick his brains. I 
know he has a sparcbook running on his network somewhere.

> 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.
>
The powerbooks and iBooks are become the geek machine of choice. A lot 
of platform independent (perl, etc.) developers. Apple ran a piece 
recently on Simon Couzens (Perl and unicode guru) switch to the Mac and 
OS X.

> 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.
>
Apple have of course just released X11 Public Beta for OSX, along with 
an SDK. And you have Fink (fink.sourceforge.net) to satisfy all your 
unix utility needs (it uses some process called apt-get and deselct, 
I'm sure I've seen those somewhere before :-) (cue Steve))

I spend a lot of my time in terminals but it's nice to have a solid gui 
that understands all the hardware, plug and plays when you really need 
it (like just plugging in a printer and printing). Having Word and 
being able to output pdfs (to send proposals to clients) is excellent 
for me but may not float everyone's boat.

And of course Apple offer you everything from the 12" iBook (Nat loves 
her's) to the 17" widescreen Powerbook (the case manufacturers must be 
loving that one, whole new product ranges)

> 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..
>
You gotta go with what fits your requirements. Having been a longtime 
Mac Advocate, I was very surprised at the number of people I knew who 
had gone out an bought iBooks or Powerbooks once they'd had a chance to 
use OS X. But these ARE mainly people for whom the underlying OS isn't 
a problem as long as they can use the machine to produce code for their 
target platform. If your writing code for i368 Linux, get a machine 
that can run it. If not, why settle for crappy PC hardware?

Neil.
-- 
Neil Ford
neil at smudgypixels.net
http://www.smudgypixels.net