Laptop Advice

[Ian Goldberg]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 04:42:55PM -0700, Taavi Burns wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 06:17:20PM -0500, Sidney Shapiro wrote:
> > Howdy all, I am looking for a laptop to use for school (essays and computer
> > science) somthing good, with a built in wireless network card and a computer
> > which will last. I am looking at spending about 1500-2000, any suggestions of
> > where to look and who to buy from?
> 
> You can get an iBook for under $2000.  University bookstores get an
> educational discount, so they're probably your best bet.  You can get
> your Word or Appleworks fix if LaTeX doesn't suit you, and all of
> your standard UNIX utils are handy for all your CS needs.  The battery
> life is great on those boxen, as is the "don't need to dick around,
> it just works" nature is great, particularly when exams come around.
> 
> You can always put Linux on it if OSX _really_ gets your goat.  I tried
> it just to see, and it ran more smoothly than I would have expected...
> but still less smoothly than OSX.  ;)

Warning: having recently been in the same boat, we found that the
wireless cards in the newer Mac laptops will *not* work under Linux.
Since wireless is important to you, make sure you _don't_ get the models
with the Airport Extreme card.  (The older Airport (not Extreme) cards
are reported to work fine.)

Some other things, like VGA out, also don't work under Linux.

   - Ian
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml