[ale] Basic Laptop for presentations question

[Geoffrey]

scott mcbrien wrote:
> Richard,
> 
> I currently use a Mac as well, but until November last year, I ran 
> laptops with RHEL for the previous 7 years.  In the beginning, things 
> were painful, but my last one, at Lenovo T60 was pretty easy.  I 
> mentioned the wackiness with the external VGA port on this thread 
> earlier, but other than that, never had a problem with the machine.  I 
> know I'm a pretty light "desktop" user, chat, web, email, and a little 
> office; but for all those things RHEL, or CentOS worked well.  I would 
> have run Fedora as my laptop distro, but was lazy and didn't want to 
> re-install every 4-6 months.

I'm running a Mac as well, although I spend most of my time booted to 
RHEL.  One thing you've got to realize, RHEL is not a laptop distro. 
It's designed for desktops/servers.  I've had much better luck on 
laptops with Mandriva.  It just bloody works.  I run it on my 'backup' 
laptop and it is sweet.

> 
> What kind of issues were you having with running a Linux Laptop?
> *crosses fingers* Please don't say hibernate/suspend...

Even the mac has kernel patches to get pretty much everything working. 
I think the bottom line is, you just have to work harder to get Linux 
working on the laptop.

Now, wireless dhcp connectivity really sucks.  I've never found a way to 
make it work without having to run the dhclient by hand.  Now that sucks.

> 
> -Scott
> 
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:39 AM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com 
> <mailto:Richard at bronosky.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I've vented on this very issue many times. I have been doing all my
>     work via SSH to Linux servers (ssh+screen+bash+vim+mysql all day
>     everyday) for so long I thought of myself as a "Linux guy"... until I
>     tried using a laptop. The entire GUI stack just drives me crazy. But,
>     it was trying to get a decent portable workstation that drove me to
>     give my ThinkPad back to my employer and ask for a MacBook Pro. I
>     can't wait until I can scrap the Mac forever. Until I can spend 75% of
>     my computing time doing my work and not trying to get my machine to
>     work, I'm a "Linux server guy" and a "Mac laptop guy". I hate that it
>     has to be that way!
> 
>     .!# RichardBronosky #!.
> 
> 
> 
>     On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 5:41 PM, James Sumners
>     <james.sumners at gmail.com <mailto:james.sumners at gmail.com>> wrote:
>      > Warning: This message contributes nothing helpful to the
>     conversation.
>      >
>      > The problem detailed in this thread is one of the biggest reasons
>     (top
>      > 3) I decided to buy an Apple laptop. I had been using Dell laptops
>      > issued to me through work/school. So I was well aware of the problems
>      > that can arise when using a Linux laptop to do presentations. I must
>      > say, I am extremely happy I made the decision I did.
>      >
>      > A Unix based OS with a GUI that makes doing presentations and such
>      > easy? That would be OS X.
> 
>  
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale


-- 
Until later, Geoffrey

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
  - Benjamin Franklin