[Sussex] SPARCBooks, Powerbooks and bog standard laptops

[Trevor Marshall]

Coming to this a bit late as I don't subscribe on the work mail address 
(really must get round to doing that, it'd stop me working more or less 
completely), but heres my GBP0.02 worth....

On Thursday 16 Jan 2003 11:29, Geoff Teale wrote:
> Here I am a day later and a lot more informed:
>
> Steve wrote:
> ------------
>
> > I've been following this SPARCbook thread.

<AOL>Me too</AOL>

<tadpole stuff snipped>
Hmm, remember we had an old Tadpole SPARCbook at work, l-o-n-g ago, and it 
was expensive, and it was slow.  Can't speak for the new ones.

> Actually I think Apple's machines are no longer good value for money in
> terms of bang for buck. For a long time I've defended Apple and said that
> it's just that they pitch to a premium market and therefore they don't
> produce budget machines (so as not to devalue the brand) - but right now
> I'm seeing stats come in from Gentoo users who are compiling everything
> fully optomised, and it's the P4 and Athlon XP users who are getting the
> best performance/price ratio.  The truth of the matter is that if you
> decide to run OS X than a G4 powerbook is a good buy, but as a LINUX
> platform you're spending a lot of money for a nice case and a big screen
> (both selling points), ironically that 17" screen could end up being more
> of a hinderance than a benefit - try using that in a cramped space.

Of course, you don't *have* to buy the 17" model, there are other Powerbooks 
available from 12" upwards.  And you get the superdrive.  And the things that 
persuaded me to buy an iBook over a WinTel laptop were the low weight 
(relative to a WinTel laptop) the better battery life.  Well, that and the 
fact that it *wasn't* WinTel and there was no possibility of paying a M$ tax 
on the purchase.  

A copy of SuSE PowerPC Edition (7.3, I think) from the Emporium and I was 
off.  OK, so it dual boots with MacOS X, thought I'd like to try it.  
Whichever OS you choose, there's a certain satisfaction in having Apache, 
PHP, MySQL and so on available.  The things that weren't supported? Internal 
modem, and some bits of the sound system as far as I can tell.  Haven't made 
XMMS work reliably.  And TuxRacer runs (hah! walks) very slowly indeed.  But 
none of these have really bothered me.

Of course, by now, after meeting Steve I'd have installed Debian in lieu of 
SuSE ...

> The latest thing I've seen is that Hyperthreading P4's are where the big
> performance gains are for LINUX - hopefully this will turn up in the laptop
> chipsets soonish.
>
> > So dump the shipped OS and install Linux.  I'll run fast I'm sure.
>
> See above - thats fine if you already have the hardware, but it doesn't
> make economic sense to do this from scratch. plus Apple hardware support
> under LINUX is _much_ worse than PC support.

Mostly true, but I think it's a feature of the number of systems in use.  If 
enough Linux users want bits of Apple hardware supported, someone will 
probably find a way.

<more snippage>

I decided to go for the iBook, since it fitted with [most of] the compromises 
I was prepared to make.  Not everything is supported, but I don't rely on 
what's not available.  It *does* run Linux, and it runs it quite well.  It's 
not the same as x86 Linux though.  For one thing PPC Linux runs big-endian 
while x86 is little endian - may not bother you, but was helpful for some s/w 
I was developing to run on a PPC system, and also on a MIPS system.

I reckon that in the end you need to decide exactly what you want to do with 
the laptop.  All computer purchases require some compromises to be made, and 
you need to decide which ones you're prepared to make.

I'm sure you've seen an iBook running Linux, but I can bring it to the next 
meeting if it helps.

--
Trevor Marshall