[ale] Laptop recommendation

[I. Herman]

This may not be the most popular on the list...but if you're going to  
spend over $1500, i'd entertain a Apple Powerbook.  OS X is built on  
Darwin, which is the Apple PPC version of FreeBSD essentially.  I  
have one and i LOVE it.  Terminals, X11, gcc, you name it.  I've  
converted windows folks with this (even my 6 & 8 y/o know about the  
"Apple and the Penguin").  I've also have never had a problem using  
tarballs to install programs from source (of course, fink works great  
too...kinda like apt-get...and uses that in some instances).

I benchmarked it running some X apps for SS7 and GPRS tracing we use  
at work, and doing the same thing (xhost, telnet, DISPLAY=, launch)  
on all 3 of my test devices, the Powerbook outperformed both of the  
following boxes when launching the X app:

Sun Ultra60 (UltraSPARC IIIi i think), 1GB RAM, 64MB Video, 10000 RPM  
SCSI
Sun Ultra10 (UltraSPARC IIe i think), 1GB RAM, 32MB Video, IDE

The powerbook beat both of those by at least 2 seconds launch time.   
You can get one with a Superdrive (CD-RW/DVD-R) for $2000 or less,  
depending on what size you want (i have the 15").

I've also used it for Firewire DVR, live Sound multitrack recording,  
Adobe Photoshop/Acrobat, and the performance of the G4 was nothing  
less than astounding.  It's the only thing I like on the same level  
as UNIX/Linux.

My Home boxes..
Slackware 10.0, Apache/SSL, PHP, MySQL
Solaris 10 on an Ultra10
Powermac 2xG5 (1.8Ghz), 1GB RAM
15" Powerbook G4

Good luck and happy hunting
Izzie