[ale] My iBook

[Geoffrey]

James Sumners wrote:
> Well, yes, distributions like those that you mentioned are going to
> work "decently" but not well. I am talking about having the peace of
> mind that if I had to take my laptop in to a major meeting, not that I
> have anything more major than class going on right now, that the
> laptop would do what I need it to without me having to figure out how
> to get my laptop to interface with their equipment because I am
> running a niche OS (on the desktop it most certainly is niche). While
> it could be argued that Mac OS is a niche OS it is more of a publicly
> accepted OS for a user machine than Linux is.

Okay, so we have your definition.  Other than the issue of 'publicly 
accepted' it sounds valid.  Personally, I don't care what's 'publicly 
accepted' because I generally know as much or more about computers as a 
whole the the folks I'm in meetings with.  Further I am more productive 
on Linux then I would be on a Windows computer.  OSX, I don't know, I've 
not used it.  I have a feeling I'd like it better than Windows, but less 
than Linux.  The thing I like about Linux is, if I can't get it to work 
like I want it to, I can lift the hood and make it work.

I also feel much more comfortable sitting down to work with a Linux 
based laptop then Windows.  It just plain works and I have a whole lot 
fewer problems than my windows counterparts.

> Just the facts. And I
> promise, getting the ATi card in this laptop to output to an external
> television or something that is NOT VGA is a real pain in the ass and
> the device has to be plugged in _before_ the laptop is turned on.
> 
> The wireless card in this machine is of the Orinoco/Hermes II variety.
> It is quite possibly one of the best, non-Prism II (as in
> prism54.org), supported cards in Linux available. The support
> absolutely sucks. I am not saying it is any fault of the people
> developing the drivers -- they are doing the best that they can with
> the information that they have. All I am saying is that I have to do a
> lot of low level stuff [driver code editing] to get certain things to
> work that should "just work".

Well, if you're willing to spend the money you can get a laptop 
preinstalled, with support and all.  I did that with my Sony, picked it 
up from Emperor Linux (http://www.emperorlinux.com/).  It has a prism54 
based wireless card, which I purchased at a later date from them. 
Completely supported in their kernel.  It just works.  I've even 
installed two different distros on it, and Emperor Linux provides a 
kernel rpm that you can use with those distros.  I recently upgraded my 
SuSE 9.2 to the 2.6 kernel provided by Emperor Linux.

> And yes, I have used wine and crossover. Aside from the fact that
> Mathcad (http://www.mathsoft.com/), the only application I use Windows
> for for class, will not work with either because it requires .NET,
> which won't work with either, I don't like wine nor crossover as a
> solution. Truly, they are a poor solution to a legitimate problem.

What would you suggest as a good solution?  Other than the vendor 
porting to Linux.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey