[rescue] non-Intel laptop for general use?

[Michael Parson]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Bill Bradford wrote:

> Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:10:32 -0500
> From: Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net>
> Reply-To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
> To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
> Subject: Re: [rescue] non-Intel laptop for general use?
> 
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 07:48:37PM -0700, James Hartley wrote:
>
>> ...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.
>
> Most of the people I know who had Tadpoles as their "main
> workstations" have now moved to Apple laptops.

Count me in that group.  Even though I own many other systems, my
Tadpole Sparcbook 3GX was the system I used for most of my workstation
chores for a number of years.  Initially with Solaris (2.6 +pkgsrc)
and later with NetBSD (once Michael Lorenz put in all the work to get
X11 and PCMCIA working).  I used it mostly since it was small and I
could keep it in the living room to monitor email and do some basic web
browsing while watching TV.

Earlier this year, I bought a MacBook.  I kept playing with the
Sparcbook for a while, but eventually, I closed it's lid and put it in
storage.  I might pull it back out when NetBSD 4.0 gets released, but
then again, I might not.

The Macbook filled a lot of slots in my computing needs.  I'd not owned
my own Macintosh since the MacPlus, and ever since I ran a Macintosh
lab several years ago with a Workgroup Server 95 running A/UX, I've
always wanted a Mac running Unix.  I've also wanted a portable Unix
workstation.

Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) is the first rev of OS X that I've had a chance to
play with extensively.  I was excited about it when it first came out,
but I just didn't have the cash to spend on it.  From what I can tell,
10.4 is the first time they got the Unix<->Mac integration properly
functional (shell commands like cp and mv doing the right thing with
resource forks, etc).  While I have a copy of 10.5 at home, I've not had
a chance to get it loaded up and played with just yet, but it promises
to be even better.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org