[nmglug] Caveats to using a 12" Powerbook as a GNU/Linux laptop?

[Larry W. Wood]

On Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 11:15  AM, Sam Noble wrote:
>  I'm tempted by the uber-cute 12" Powerbook.

Why would you need to run another OS other than MacOSX?  The newest 
laptops come with Panther (10.3), which includes:

	 v4.3 of XFree86's X11 + X11 SDK (in addition to OSX's XCode Tools)
	X11R6.6 window server (the default window manager is quartz-wm, but 
you can use any window manager or desktop you want):  FVWM, Ice, mwm, 
Sawfish, WindowMaker, Blackbox, Enlightenment, Oroborus, XFce, PWM,  
---  the list is endless.  (see http://fink.sourceforge.net)
	Hardware acceleration support for OpenGL and DirectCG

	You can run GNOME or KDE + their toolkits (GTK+, glib & glade, for 
sure, and Qt libraries). You can even run Motif, if you want.  (again, 
see fink for all this).  Oh, by the way, you can run your X11 DTE of 
choice either as an Aqua window or full screen, and keystroke switch 
between them (and also cut & past between them).	You can run as many 
customizable x-terms as you wish (of course, you'd be at a BSD command 
line, not linux.

	Fink has ported many hundreds of unix application to MacOSX (including 
GIMP).  Just about anything you would need.  OSX comes with gcc 3.3, 
but  3.1 and 2.95 are available.  No FORTRAN compiler, but fink 
provides g77 (the GNU FORTRAN77 compiler).  And, there's always 
RealBasic.

	Using osx2x, you can control all your other X11machines from your Mac.
	Integrating an OSX box into a network of unix boxes is straightforward 
using VNC.
	For Window boxes, OSX comes with it's own Samba server
	It also comes with Cups, PostFix, Apache and it's own VPN.  MySQl and 
PostgreSQL are available for OSX.  As far as Perl, PHP, Python, TeX, 
LaTeX, vi(vim), Emacs, etc., are concerned (I believe), OSX is just 
another unix.

The main problem you might run into is if you have a lot of proprietary 
unix/linux applications that you need to run, or other unix/linux apps 
that for some reason have not been ported to OSX.

Well, that 's just a teaser.  There's lot's more.  For the full picture 
I recommend:

	"MacOSX Panther for Unix Geeks", by Jepson & Rothman, from O'REILLY!

and don't forget to go to http://fink.sourceforge.net

HTH     --  Woody

P.S.  --  If you wanted to, you could run your "uber-cute" 12" 
Powerbook as a server!