a perfect Linux Laptop vs iBook/Powerbook - Page 2

I second this. I tried Linux/Ubuntu for the first time last week on my Sony S270 (which is for sale, btw) and installation went without a hitch. Wireless was working intermitently, so I updated the firmware and driver and now its flawless. All the rest worked perfectly out-of-the-box.

As far as compatibility out-of-the-box, burn a couple Live CDs and take them to your PC retailer. When no one is looking, slip one in the CD drive and restart. (Disclaimer: I do not actually know if the above will work (do retail stores put BIOS passwords on their computers?), nor do I promote this action. Attempt at your own risk.)

My PowerBook only makes noise when I have the processor ramped up at full speed, and even then it doesn't sound nearly as loud as some PC laptops running at idle.

Mac OS X is not Linux; it's Unix. Apple has done something that no other company has ever been able to do; they took Unix and turned it into a desktop system useable by anyone.

PowerBook processors don't get any hotter than the Pentium M processors. My PowerBook idles at around 105-110 degrees and I've never seen it get any higher than 141 on full CPU load. They might seem hotter, however, because the chassis acts as a heat sink, whereas a plastic PC laptop has specific channels for hot and cold air to pass through.

Kakaze,

yes, I read all that before I got my own PB for short and, frankly, I was feeling myself like cheated by macfun's PR. Maybe it's because I had too high expectations. The display and relative slowness were my major unsatisfactions, anyway. Still, the books are good from many different perspectives and I can understand why. I think Apple should make some extra efforts to produce specialized Macs for scientific community that "work from the box", if it is interested to win this small peace of the market.

PS: G4 consumes up to 25 Watt and Centrinos-I up to 21 Watt, right?
PPS: IMHO, magnesium composite NB cases are technologically more advanced than alu boxes. However, I am not prepared to compare here their respective heat dissipation effectiveness.
PPPS: The fun noise of PB was lower than the fun noise of the lappy I have now
but it had a high frequency component which I really hated.
PPPPS: Philosophicaly, I am on the side of Macs, but ... (i) disappointed, (ii) waiting for new generation of their mobile chips (I am not he one who is waiting for a mythical "PB G5" ).

Heh as an audio guy that faced the same delima I can give you my opinion and you can take it with a pinch of salt should you choose....

Mac is the System to get if you need others to be able to easily use it.

Linux is the OS if you like to customize your box to your uptmost dreams

Unfortunatly I have found that not enough Linux apps are ported to Mac for my tastes, I will be going back to x86 Linux for my machine with either a turion or a dual core turion depending on the timeframe. However I will be using the Mac for show control and playback in shows where someone else may need to be able to run it at a moments notice. Both OSes are better than Microsoft to me, I prefer Linux but Mac is at least useable from my standpoint.

If they would port Ardour, ReZound and all that over I would love it

Seablade

Ivar: Macs already work for science out of the box. More and more research labs are switching to OS X, especially when they can create super computer clusters that use the same operating system as their individual personal computers.

Seablade: If you're an audio guy shouldn't you be using ProTools? Anyway...

http://www.mp3machine.com/software/ArdourX/

Rezound looks to be ported through here: http://openosx.com/readystream/

Well seems the crash killed some posts so I will summarize what I know of of the posts...

ProTools is far from the be all end all of audio...

The Ardour link links to the Source Code which would need to be modified a little for a Mac as it looks for linux kernel headers for example for the keyboard

Rezound links to a company that has problems giving credit to others for their work so I dont use them

And the site that the link dissapeared from that links to compile instructions for ardour on a mac is not completly correct

Ok that is all I know of anyways...

Seablade

I think you got most of it.

Now, when Apple switches to Intel chips and platform my prognosis about new Powerbooks with
new Freescale "G4" chips will not realise. Anyway, my point was that the current Apple NB harware is not worthy of investment at the moment. Now it is clear, I think. One should waite.
Only those who can't live without MACs, who don't want or can't deal with M$ $oftware or with tricky free Linux software installations, who want "everything" to work out of the box now, those should still consider MACs, IMHO.

I hope Macs will catch up with new chips generation in 2006!
Powerbooks with Yohan, with Mac OS X and ...OS available simultaneously, it's cool (esp. if Apple will manage to make them cool -))!

Heh as I found out in buying mine, Macs can be worth the investment just for quality and little creature comforts like 6 pin firewire ports to provide bus power to my interfaces. Its amazing how hard it is to find that at times, and the quality with the knowledge that it isnt going to crash in the middle of a show can make it worth it to some people...

Now that being said I think given the recent confirmation of the switch to intel hardware, it may indeed be better to wait on a mac unless you need one for a show or something soon(Which I did and it is currently the only thing in my system running great, the venue has defied physics multiple times over

Seablade

There's no reason to wait. PPC Macs are going to be supported by Apple for years to come, and companies will be releasing Universal Binary versions of their software for several years as well...I say at least 5 to 10 years before software is released Intel only.

A Mac bought today isn't going to stop working tomorrow...and besides, by the time the Intel Macs come out in full force it will be time to upgrade to a new machine anyway due to natural obsolescence.

Officially they will be supported but in practice the support will decline. Besides, who will write new software for the outdated platform? Particularly, for the needs of scientific applications, who will continue to develop Altivec optimised applications?

Congratualtions with your purchase, Seablade. Hope you will like it and make good use of it in astrophysics and elsewhere. To have PB on your side is kind of great, and it was for me too, in spite of my criticism here and partial disappointment.

Dear Friends,

For purposes of comparison, I run what is now an antique, a 5680, on debian. Everything works, period.

The only reason I do not dump windows entirely is because of streets and trips.

Now, I am not a gamer, although my kids play most everything via cedega.

Depending upon the numbers you have to crunch, and which programmes you need to run, you can then choose between the mobile and the pIV porcessors.

Right now, the dell precision m70 is cheap and good.

ATI gets far less performance in linux than windows, noticeable in x.org immediately after a few mintues in xp. Nvidia have had some issues, noticieably with acpi, but the performance vs convenience issue is a compromise only the buyer can make.

That said, all my subsystem programmer friends still believe that ppc architecture is better. The effect of this on daily life, and the sheer convenience of the mac hardware/software is another trade-off. The downside is that the architchture issues in the ati drivers for ppc are real, and are not going to be solved tomorrow. I am not sure as to how nvdia handles x.org/ppc, but someone here should know.

All this said, the purchase of an windows OS merely to produce a .ppt file is not rational, as that parameter admits of other solutions.

Thus, the real issue is peformance of the machine with the video card therein, the availability of the programmes the purchaser uses and needs, price, and finally reliability.

In the end, since the price benefit, including all software, falls to mac when compared to windows, this is a no brainer. On the other hand, compared to an x86 arch with linux, the price advantage falls obviously to the x86. THe next factor is reliability. I am not sure I would try the abuse to a dell precision that I give to my sager, but, looking at total cost of ownership, there is a distinct price advantage to dell, particularly if you cna get business credit, or an instituional price/lease.

I would, however, avoid ubuntu. The actual advatage of the excellent hardware detection drops considerably when one needs complete debian compatibility. libranet, for only $80 or Suse for about the same, will give you that. For free, kanotix or fc4 likewise.

Distros with odd file placement when confonted with the need to run a programme necessarily built from source will create the nasty business of editing makefiles by hand.

My gut feeling is to look at the sager line first, then dell. Partitioning hard drives from the more consumer oriented companies often creates a mess at warranty time. Also, if you are not going to run windows, sager do not charge the "MS tax," you can buy from pctorque with no os.

In other words, you can always write .ppt somehow, so the decision is price/performance/reliabilty among the chips and manufacturers.

All good wishes,

Yazdzik

Look how long 68k was supported after the transition to PPC. Fat binaries were made for several years after the switch.

This is no different.

Altivec will be replaced with SSE3, which apparently developers seem to like better as it has more features.

The world will go on and the sizeable base of installed PPC Macs will not be ignored.

Dell 9300 and Xandros Business Edition 3.0. Nothing more to say except I beta tested this Linux Distro on this laptop and it ran seamlessly. I recommend looking for one with nvida video, but price increases significantly. Xandros released BE 3.0 and its gold version runs fantasic on the 17" wide screen.

Eric

Interesting speculative article about intel future of Macs:
http://arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050608.ars

Time frame Apple product Intel processor
1Q 06-2Q 06 Mac Mini, iBook, and PowerBook Yonah: A dual-core Pentium M successor; 65nm process; 32-bit; SSE3; improved FPU performance
2Q 06-3Q 06 iMac Sossaman: A desktop Yonah derivative. This chip will have very low power consumption for a dual-core desktop design.
4Q 06-1Q 07 PowerBook
PowerMac Merom: A dual-core Pentium M (Banias) successor
Conroe: A 64-bit desktop version of Merom (see comments above about Conroe).
3Q or 4Q 07 Xserve A Xeon based on the same architecture as Merom and Conroe.

--
So, as I told, I am waiting for a dual core Yohan PB!

BTW, it is sad that Powerbooks based on new dual core Freescale processors announced in
fall 2004 (with the consumed power 10W!!) will not be produced. I would love to get such a powerbook for me!

I would go for a PC and add Fedora Core 4 as it is simply the most hardware compatible thing out there. Seriously, in FC4 Bluetooth, WiFi, Fireware, USB, and my printer worked right off the bat. Amazing. I've never had it this easy before.

Setting up the dual boot is very easy. Just take your Windows machine and partition the drive into two equal portions (or however you want to distribute it), then have windows on one and then install FC4 and set up the GRUB bootloader during install as you like and that is it. It is really very simple.

FCM ....welcome back to a month old thread.

I tried FC3 and I hated it, nothing and i mean NOTHING worked out of the box. No wifi, resolution was all wrong, everything was just EWW, and it couldn't evne do a stable boot 1/2 the time. just eww. Well, different hardware I guess, but still. As far as I am aware bluetooth is pretty damn easy to configure and so if Firewire USB and Printer if you just install CUPS (which is standard on just about every distro these days). And of course dual boot is easy beans...from any installer.

I was in a similar position for a while... I wanted a *nix laptop to complement my gaming XP desktop.

Eventually I went to the PowerBook. I'm happy overall.. there is no other laptops like it how they go to sleep instantly. Its a little warm at 12" 1.5 GHZ but the keyboard is unparalleled. The display, sucks, however. Won't lie about that OSX is nice, fun to get even "drag and drop" webservers like MAMP www.mamp.info

Fink is fun, but luckily I don't need it much for anything.

I chose OSX because I was always unhappy with the responsiveness of Linux on my desktop PC. Something about it just doesn't seem as snappy as Windows and OSX... and I am no Linux guru so I figured it was not yet worth the headache for me.

I love the iSuite. Instead, I'm going to try out Linux again on my next desktop where there should be less issues. Philosophically I love the thing, but I've still got issues with a lot of things often on the UI front... Gnome is so "big" and KDE is so ... well KDE I'll probably give XFCE a try... I just fear headaches with Cedega running all my games and not being able to find good tools like Visual Studio, Dev-CPP, FileZilla, no ability to connect to iTunes shares on my laptop which manages all my multimedia, and no good image editing programs (no, the GIMP doesn't cut it yet, most un-userfriendly thing I've ever tried to use over the years on multiple occasions... the interface is just so ****ing large and in the way, and to carry out tasks its just unintuitive... one day I hope that someone forks the damn thing and makes a real interface.)

As for x86 Macs... While I had waited a year to get my PB waiting for some kind of update, and wish I saw the x86 train coming, its still great.

Also, PPC will not lose support. There are 25 Million PPC Macs out there and new software runs on old 600 MHZ G3's still... there are 0 x86 Macs Support will be there a while.

on the linux topic of this thread (motly regarding jeffbacks:

KDE distros are usually slower than Gnome distros. IceWM and Fluxbox are even faster. e17 is faster than that. I have no idea why you dont like gnome if it looks a lot like a mac interface.

Cadega is actually pretty easy to use for games when paired with point2play

e17 is FASTER?

That surprises me, I knew they were good, but sheesh, THAT good?

Seablade