Notebook Recommendation

[Kevin Geiss]

I'm waivering between a dell inspiron 8200 and an apple ibook.

the ibook has a 5 or 6 hour battery life. I've gotten email from 3 owners
of inspiron 8200s that they can only get 3.

the dell has a 1600x1200 display with 24bit color though!  you can get it
with wireless ethernet built in, but I don't know if it works in linux. I
know the built-in wired ethernet and even the built in softmodem will
work in linux.

the ibook's display is 1024x768 with 16 bit color. my wife has one,
and I can tell you that it is a really nice display.

the cpu in the dell is 1.6ghz p4, so will definitely be faster than the
ibook's 700mhz g3; but see my sentence about battery life above.

the ibook is 2 lbs lighter than the dell.

my wife's ibook is a year old and still has full battery life. I have
a friend whose old inspiron is a bit over 3 years old, and his original
battery still works great. So I would say both laptops can probably last
a long time. (i used to have an ibm thinkpad; two batteries lasted 6
months each!)

I priced out the ibook with dvd cdrw and 640mb ram, 30gb hard drive
for right about $2000. the dell comes in around $2200, with just dvd,
no burner, 512mb ram, and 30gb drive. both had wireless ethernet (i know
it will work on the ibook, but I'm not sure about the inspiron yet).

you can get an nvidia video chip in the inspiron. the ibook has an ati
radeon. you said linux would be your sole OS, so either video chip should
be fine for you. with nvidia you have to use their closed-source driver,
radeon has been said to have the best open source drivers.

my latest decision is to go with the ibook, but that could change again,
I keep going back and forth. I like the fact that the OS I'll be forced
to pay for on the ibook is kinda unix, so I might even play with it a
little (plus it can play quicktime, woohoo)

a nice thing about the ibook is they're all the same, so everyone knows
what hardware is in there; makes configuring easy. the only bad thing
is that the built-in modem is software. but I use it very seldom, so
i can reboot to mac os x when i need it. plus i can also put sendmail,
procmail, fetchmail and mutt on mac os X (try that in windows!)

there is a kernel patch for the ibook so you can map keyboard keys
to the second and third mouse buttons. on the dell you have to do the
uber-annoying 'hit two mouse buttons at the same time to get the middle
button' thing

gentoo is my favorite distro. gentoo also has a powerpc version. you
said you wanted to learn about linux; you would definitely learn a lot
with gentoo, but it might be rough going at first, it's designed for
the knowledgeable linux user.

I know debian also has a ppc version. then there's yellow dog if you
want to stay kinda redhatty.

I've spent the last month looking into laptops, can you tell? I eliminated
ibm thinkpads. I loved my old one, but the screen wasn't that nice and
damn it ate batteries! a battery should last longer than 6 months.

On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 12:45:15PM -0700, Michael  J. Schweppe wrote:
> I want to get a notebook that will have Linux as the sole OS.  Can you
> fine folks share with me your experiences and recommendations as which
> brand[s] to consider?
> 
> Specifically I'd like to know if there are any special challenges with
> the recognition of the built in ethernet and pointing device [eraser
> head or touch].
> 
> I'll most likely go with RH since that is what I have the most
> experience with--although I understand true 'enthusiasts' use Debian
> :-)  I understand people are quiet passionate about the distro they
> use, but I would consider straying from Red Hat if another distro
> provided a better notebook optimization.
> 
> My goal is to learn Linux well.  I don't need the fine polish GUI of
> RH, but then again I do not want to operate solely in a CL environment
> all the time either.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike
> 
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