[rescue] non-Intel laptop for general use?

[Robert Darlington]

Oh, and just to be complete, you can always get an sgi Indy and a
presenter panel.   Hide the Indy under your desk and pretend it's a
laptop (just like they did in that tornado movie!)

-Bob

On 10/29/07, Robert Darlington <rdarlington at gmail.com> wrote:
> I used to use them when I worked for .gov.  They were kinda a pain in
> the butt, but then again I was running Solaris on them.  (I love
> Solaris, don't get me wrong).  I think there was an 802.11a wireless
> card available for them, no 802.11b card / drivers at the time.  one
> of the BSD unix like os's probably has something, perhaps even Linux.
>
> From my point of view, you'll either be running an old version of
> Solaris rather slowly or a modern BSD OS at medium speed.   Pick any
> old P3 or P4 laptop and you can run both of these OS's at reasonable
> speed, Windows, QNX, apparently now you can run OS X (the new one that
> is legally stamped as UNIX), and just about any other OS.   You also
> won't have trouble finding parts, and it'll be dirt cheap (my 1 GHz P4
> laptop was $140 delivered).  Get yourself a free copy of VMWare and
> run them all at the same time.  GNU compilers are just as crappy on
> x86 as they are on Sparc so you're not going to gain anything in this
> arena but you'll have a lot more options in the long run.
>
> Just my 2 cents, feel free to keep the change.
>
> -Bob
>
> On 10/29/07, James Hartley <jjhartley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/29/07, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:
> > > When I was a younger man, people used to buy computers to run particular
> > > programs on, and that software decision drove the platform choice - you appear
> > > to want to not follow that model.
> > >
> > > I assume by non-Intel you mean not WinTel (Intel and Windows), would MacTel be
> > > acceptable? I am very fond of my MacBook Pro.
> >
> > I've noticed over the year or so that I have read this list that a
> > number of people favor their [Power|Mac]books.  Yes, I'm considering
> > them as well.
> >
> > ...but I'm also curious as to what Tadpole owners|users think of their
> > purchase which was my motivation for posting.  Most on this list are
> > not afraid of sharing unvarnished opinions, & I was hoping to gain
> > from their experience.
> >
> > As for why non-Intel, the *BSD's that I am likely to run all have
> > ports to the common platforms, so I don't feel I am not limiting
> > myself by making a nonstandard processor choice.
> >
> > Of course the price/durability ratio is an issue, & yes, an Intel
> > solution may be cheaper, but I am willing to pay a bit more if the
> > engineering is clearly solid.  Here again I figured that soliciting
> > for opinions here would clear up any ambiguity on whether supporting
> > something other than the gigantic Intel machine is merely a romantic
> > notion.  :-)
> >
> > I do appreciate the comments made thus far.  Are there any Tadpole
> > users out there?
> >
> > Jim
> > _______________________________________________
> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue