Re: Laptop Recommendations?

[bja@Illinois.DynDNS.Org]

Thanks for the thoughts everyone. I took a trip to the Apple retail store
in St. Louis and ended up buying a new 12" Powerbook with a Superdrive.
Adding a printer, iSight (webcam), and a wireless mouse I paid around
$2100. It's a 1.33Ghz G4 with 256MB of RAM for anyone interested. I'll be
ordering a gig of ram from crucial shortly to bring me up to 1.25GB and
that'll be about $450. (Cheaper than buying from Apple directly.)

KDE is now native on OS X. I installed it and am now using Konqueror to
access my webmail. KOffice also works well and it'll save me the cost of
using MS Office or using the very ugly version of OO.o. Some things don't
seem to work (kopete randomly crashes), but on the whole, KDE is very
functional on MacOS X.

Fink has given me a couple problems (pango didn't get configured properly
for some reason) but I've managed to fix that by using apt-get directly.
No reason that I can find for this situation, but fink won't resolve it.
Gaim still doesn't display graphics, but the text works. (Maybe it isn't
obvious but I am trying to replace iChat.)

Some nice open-source apps for Mac OS X: X-ChatAqua is a native port of
X-Chat to OS X. KDE on Darwin provides a native distribution (considered
Alpha quality) but very stable for the apps that matter to me (Kontact,
KOffice, Konqueror). Fink provides a version of apt-get and a repository
for OS X binaries (most graphical apps require Apple X11, a free
download). Gimp2 has a native OS X version as well. iPhoto + Gimp + iDVD
owns all.

Using the downloaded Developer's Tools and some packages from Fink's
repository I was able to build Mindless Automaton, my favorite game for
Apple's X11. The default install even included emacs and vi.

I recommend a powerbook to anyone looking for a nice new laptop. If you
don't get all of the options (e.g. a dvd burner and a webcam) you can save
about $400 making a 12" powerbook a decent price.

Thanks for the suggestions/ideas/opinions/information.

Brandon Adams
bja@metawire.org


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