d_m
Guru
Joined: 12 Jun 2003
Posts: 570
Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
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 Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 1:25 am Post subject: Re: Thinking of getting an apple laptop |
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| MonkeyMartin wrote: | I want to get an apple laptop becasue I want to try out pather.
is it a good idea to get a mac?
I will also be installing linux on this laptop.
what do you think? |
So I own one of the 15" Powerbooks (1.5GHz). It only runs OS X.
I like OS X well enough for day-to-day stuff--it's really slick and just works. As far as development goes, building packages is a pain (I do use fink, been meaning to try portage for OS X); you don't realize how many people code in x86-specific shit until you run PPC.
As far as Linux goes--some caveats:
1. The Airport Extreme (802.11g) internal cards don't work under Linux (Broadcom, no open-source drivers)
2. You probably won't be able to get 3d acceleration working in hardware (esp. not with the Radeon cards that some of them ship with).
3. You will definitely have to install a lot of ~ppc packages, many of which might actually be unstable.
4. Precompiled binaries, like most games, sun's java, etc. won't work cause your architecture is different.
5. You might have real issues with the sound card. I hear some powerbooks support ALSA well, but I know that some macs definitely have issues.
Until at least some of those issues are ironed-out, I don't feel the need to install Linux on this baby.
That said, they are really nice systems. It will probably last you awhile, and the warranty is pretty good. Also, I think PPC linux has come a long way in the last couple of years. I was running gentoo/ppc on an imac (still installed, rarely on) about 2 years ago and that wasn't so much fun. I set ARCH=~ppc and things eventually just broke. If you search way back you can see a post about trying to get sound working (bondi blue imac).
Anyway, I like the machines a lot, but I don't want to give you the wrong idea... Apple's can run Linux, but in many ways they are second-class citizens compared to x86.
Good luck. |
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