[sleepkyng]

been thinking about moving away from apple and windows for a while, but i love the laptop thing, is this possible?

cheers

 

[k.ODOMA]

Yes it's possible. Check out Yellow Dog Linux. Although I've heard about small problems (like power management) but that is true of most notebooks.

 

[ChickenScrtchBoy]

Interesting... why did they base it off Fedora?
Isn't Gentoo much better for these sort of "limited hardware" implementations?

 

[rsaavedra]

I'm also planning to get a laptop very soon, and want to have Linux on it, but discarded the IBooks because I've been told Linux on Macs is not really the greatest idea. It seems while the lattest all Linux things can be found for Intel platforms, not so much so for the PowerPC platforms, Linux on Macs seems to be lagging behind. Other than that I think the Ibooks are great for their price, lightweightness, and alleged sturdiness. That last sentence from reading the web, never used them.

My current choices are either an IBM Thinkpad T42, or a Sony Vaio S260, most likely the latter. Will install both Windows and either Mandrake or Fedora on it.

On the Vaio S260, check out this great review on notebookforums.com. Its relatively small widescreen seems to be the best screen ever on any laptop, and has many other excellent features.

 

[Zanth]

I did this...in the beginning. Then I came to my senses.

Honestly, after working with all the major OS' on the market and moreover, pretty nigh all flavours of linux and bsd, and then even after designing a proprietary OS (though based loosely on bsd/linux, minus GUI) I have to say that OS X.x is insane. It is by far the best OS on the market today. You get all the power and flexibility of a *nix kernel (really bsd) and a swank, stable and FAST GUI. One simply can't go wrong.

Now, do you want to play with some cool *nix programs? No problem, install FINK and have a party. Gnome, KDE and a plethora of programs. Who needs Yellow Dog, PPC this or that...when you have Fink and Aqua? Seriously.

 

[plainsong]

Yeah it's bsd with a next type window manager, but if you insist on more nix options, what about X11?

 

[Zanth]

Darwin works better than an add-on X11 server. Darwin comes with a new Powerbook in Xtools. Apple sure rocks lately

Fink requires an X server of some kind, Darwin is much faster than X11.

 

[k.ODOMA]

Quote:

Originally Posted by rsaavedra My current choices are either an IBM Thinkpad T42, or a Sony Vaio S260, most likely the latter. Will install both Windows and either Mandrake or Fedora on it.

I have a T42 and the thing is amazing. I can't recommend it enough. And I'm not sure even Sony can match IBM's build quality (Apple's probably the only contender).

 

[gregaphonic]

for work, I use both a powerbook and a t42, and have to say, for the day-to-day, love the IBM, they make great workhorse machines. Pbook is dandy, but I keep going back to the IBM.

on the mac side of things, gentoo rocks, but recently I've found fink to be acceptable, and is a nice compliment to my mac working environment, so I've stuck with it. I use evolution for mail, etc, and can pop right over to photoshop when needed. I guess I do this kinda backwords, since most of my time on the mac is spent in X land, but it works for me. Now if adobe would start porting apps to linux, it might be a different story... Gottta love it that apple finally has a real OS (ducks the old-skool mac flames)

 

[MichaelFranks]

I have gentoo installed on a 1.25ghz powerbook. After using osx I haven't booted into it very often though. Check out gentoo's PPC FAQ for details on getting it up and running. The only packages you won't be able to run are going to be things distributed as binaries. Not many of those in the portage tree actually, so go for it!

 

[wallijonn]

Some people like Ubuntu on their Macs. But if you're running OSX there's very little reason to switch.