Re: gEDA-user: OT: Recommendations for laptop?

[der Mouse <mouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>   - Closed source OS rubs some folks the wrong way - even when they
> provide free development tools & documentation for coding on top of
> the OS, not having access to the guts is annoying.

It actually can be anywhere from irrelevant to intolerable, depending
on what you're trying to do.  For me, "crippling" is usually about the
right level.

NetBSD does run on many of the Apple laptops, but then, as I put it
before, most of the Apple benefits go away (if they haven't already -
as I remarked, Apple's UI is not a benefit for me, for example).

> So given you don't like Apple, what do you recommend for a good
> laptop?

It depends fairly heavily on what you want to do with it.  Perhaps, for
you, Apple _is_ a good choice - for example, if you don't mind spending
money on the OS, and you just want to run (say) geda-&-pcb, it may well
be a reasonable choice.

For me, it isn't; the closed-source OS is pretty crippling on pragmatic
grounds and intolerable on philosophical grounds.  I haven't found
anything I really like.  The best two laptops I have so far are an IBM
WorkPad z50 and a Tadpole SPARCbook whose model number I forget.  Each
has a non-Intel-architecture CPU (MIPS and SPARC), which I consider a
benefit.  Neither one has tremendous screen resolution (800x600 maybe?
I forget), and their colour capabilities aren't flashy.  Each one has
difficulty with disks (the z50 has no interface designed for disk - I
use a CF-interface microdrive - and the SPARCbook takes SCSI laptop
drives, which are thin on the ground and usually small (~1G) when you
can find them, and the OBP doesn't play nice with the IDE-to-SCSI
laptop disk adapter I have handy, though another "just the same" works
fine with my Voyager).  The z50 has good battery life, something like
six hours, mostly because I got a new battery for it; the SPARCbook has
just about no battery life, but I haven't replaced its battery.  Each
has good keyboard feel and tolerable (but not especially good) keyboard
layout - I'm picky about keyboard layout.  The z50 has a fairly low RAM
limit, and my add-on RAM for it died, so I haven't turned it on in
quite a while - I don't recall what the SPARCbook has for RAM, but I
think it's plenty.  If I found myself needing a working laptop, I'd
probably try to get each in working order, which means getting a new
battery for the SPARCbook and looking harder for a RAM module for the
z50.  Oh, and look for multi-gig mass storage with a PCMCIA interface,
for the SPARCbook.

I know just about nothing about what's available new.  I _really_ don't
want to spend money on an Intel-architecture machine, and I don't know
of anyone making laptops with anything else - though it hasn't mattered
enough for me to put serious effort into looking.

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