[CS-FSLUG] A little advice, please

[Timothy Butler]

>
> The question, then: Whom would you trust as a vendor of used laptops? 
> I will mention in passing that IBMs are favored with BSD devs, and 
> Compaq/HP are reputed the worst choices. My experience with this and 
> another Gateway makes me view them favorably. In general, the FOSS 
> community likes the response from the big 3 Japanese brands. Given 
> that, I'd like to read your comments on what you would do in my place.

	Well, I'm sure you know what I'd recommend, Ed. Assuming you get 
enough donations (and if you get enough for an IBM ThinkPad, you'll 
have enough): an Apple PowerBook or iBook... especially a PowerBook, 
though. They are built very solidly, generally get top honors and are 
fairly competitively priced with the good quality books. I'd echo the 
warnings about Compaq/HP.

	I like Dells, but depending on the features you want, you may spend as 
much as it would cost to buy an Apple to get a Dell. The best part 
about the Apple is that you're going to turn it on the first time to 
find it already has a full blown BSD-based *nix OS running on it with 
full hardware support. No tweaking. No fighting. No muss. No fuss. You 
can install Fink if you want apt-get, or you can go to OpenDarwin and 
get a ports system installed, just like FreeBSD.

	Here's another cool thing about Apple laptops: they keep their value. 
When you decide you need something different in three years, you'll 
still be able to get some money back if you sell your system. Plus, 
Apple has a very good hardware cycle -- if you buy a system now, it 
won't be on the clearance shelves tomorrow. And, even OS X Tiger will 
run on systems going back to 1998 or so without any real problems -- 
considering that systems released before 2000ish weren't even intended 
to run a full fledged UNIX-based OS, that's pretty impressive!

	Mac OS X Tiger is revolutionary, and if you're interested in a Mac 
laptop, I'd be happy to go over why Tiger alone is a good enough reason 
to consider the system.

	-Tim

---
Timothy R. Butler | "Turning and turning in the widening gyre
tbutler at ofb.biz   |  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
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