[geeks] AOpen makes SPARC notebooks?

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 02:17:01PM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
>>> I'd like a non-x86 laptop, particularly a SPARC, but trying to use a
>>> sparc64 one would involve so many other problems that I consider it
>>> more of a pain than not using a SPARC laptop at all.
>>
>> Would you enlarge upon that latter comment?
>
> All my own machines run rather old NetBSD - 1.4T, dating from February
> 2000.  (That's approximately when it became inescapable to me that
> NetBSD was no longer interested (if they ever were) in being the sort
> of system I really want to run.  I still run it because I haven't
> found anything closer yet.)
>
> NetBSD 1.4T does not really support sparc64 (I've tried to use it on
> U1s and U2s, and while it sort-of works, it's only sort-of).  So a
> sparc64 laptop would mean I'd have to either make it run something
> different from the rest of my machines, or I'd have to move everything
> to another OS.

Even on the 32 bit sparc laptops, like my Sparcbook 3GX, NetBSD only
really became viable in the past year if you follow -current.  It now
has full PCMCIA support, APM, 8, 16, and 32bit accellerated X11 (XFree86
+ pnozz), and sound (output only right now).  It is definately snappier,
if not over-all faster, than Solaris 2.6 was on the same hardware.

> Either of those alternatives looks to me like more headache than just
> living without a SPARC-based laptop.

I'm still not 100% comfortable with NetBSD/Sparc64 running the 64 bit
stuff.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org