[ale] Basic Laptop for presentations question

[James Taylor]

I've been running SUSE on my laptops and desktop machines for for over eight years.
I agree with  Scott that it used to be a challenge, but the last several releases have been very smooth to install and use on just about any hardware I've thrown at it.  The latest Nvidia drivers actually handle the external monitor issues I've had in the past quite well.
The only complaint I have at the moment is that the latest kernel version seems to have broken bluetooth, but I expect that to be temporary. 

Even the upgrades have gotten better. I used to have to reinstall my machines from scratch to upgrade them, but I've upgraded my ll.0 and some 10.3 openSUSE boxes directly to 11.1 with a lot less effort than the backup, wipe, reinstall and restore I had been doing.

I have a few Macs, a MacBook, MacBook Pro, a Mini and an old G3 that I use mainly for testing.  I put openSUSE 10.2 on the Mini, and I had 11 running on the MacBook for awhile.  I plan to put OSX back on the Mini and install 11.1 on the G3 (it's too slow for Leopard).

Macs are OK, but I find them too limiting compared to my Linux boxes. 

-jt


James Taylor
The East Cobb Group, Inc.
678-697-9420
james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com
http://www.eastcobbgroup.com




>>> scott mcbrien <smcbrien at gmail.com> 4/15/2009 03:53 AM >>> 
Richard,
I currently use a Mac as well, but until November last year, I ran laptops
with RHEL for the previous 7 years.  In the beginning, things were painful,
but my last one, at Lenovo T60 was pretty easy.  I mentioned the wackiness
with the external VGA port on this thread earlier, but other than that,
never had a problem with the machine.  I know I'm a pretty light "desktop"
user, chat, web, email, and a little office; but for all those things RHEL,
or CentOS worked well.  I would have run Fedora as my laptop distro, but was
lazy and didn't want to re-install every 4-6 months.

What kind of issues were you having with running a Linux Laptop?
*crosses fingers* Please don't say hibernate/suspend...

-Scott

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:39 AM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com>wrote:

> I've vented on this very issue many times. I have been doing all my
> work via SSH to Linux servers (ssh+screen+bash+vim+mysql all day
> everyday) for so long I thought of myself as a "Linux guy"... until I
> tried using a laptop. The entire GUI stack just drives me crazy. But,
> it was trying to get a decent portable workstation that drove me to
> give my ThinkPad back to my employer and ask for a MacBook Pro. I
> can't wait until I can scrap the Mac forever. Until I can spend 75% of
> my computing time doing my work and not trying to get my machine to
> work, I'm a "Linux server guy" and a "Mac laptop guy". I hate that it
> has to be that way!
>
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 5:41 PM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Warning: This message contributes nothing helpful to the conversation.
> >
> > The problem detailed in this thread is one of the biggest reasons (top
> > 3) I decided to buy an Apple laptop. I had been using Dell laptops
> > issued to me through work/school. So I was well aware of the problems
> > that can arise when using a Linux laptop to do presentations. I must
> > say, I am extremely happy I made the decision I did.
> >
> > A Unix based OS with a GUI that makes doing presentations and such
> > easy? That would be OS X.