Re: Apple Powerbook 5300 - ?
Hugo van der Merwe <hugovdm@mail.com> writes:
> Hello,
>
> I know someone who has an old Apple Powerbook 5300CS... she wants to
> sell the thing, to get a newer machine that runs windows, as there will
> then be more people that can help her with "stuff"...
>
> I am considering buying this thing, and am now busy with a little
> "research". Maybe I should rather try the debian-powerpc list? What I
> need to know, is how does the powerpc port of Debian compare to the i386
> port? Are there a lot fewer packages that work on powerpc, or will I
> feel completely at home? I have never worked with non-intel architecture
> machines (except at school, before I knew anything of computers: CAD
> software on an Acorn...)
You can get or compile a lot for PPC. As for the rest, well, for
example there's no acroread, and we have reached Netscape 4.7 on the
PPC. But as far as I can tell the system is stable. Once it's going --
which can take some time: different boot methods, printing to the
serial port, you should know how to configure a keyboard, and so on
--, it's fine and performs well. I'm running potato/Helix Gnome on a
PB 3400.
> If anyone has experience with these machines, how is their
> speed/performance? I believe it has a 100Mhz processor, hopefully 32MB
> RAM... I'm used to an old pentium 120 laptop, very slow, but suits my
> needs reasonably...
The 5300's performance under MacOS is far from good, and the only
Linux to run on that beast is MkLinux, without SCSI- and CD-, and with
only buggy serial port support. It's said to be faster than MacOS
though. Apart from that, the power plug and the serial port hardware
are of incredibly low quality. Do not buy this machine.
> Thanks,
> Hugo van der Merwe
YPB5300MMV, but I don't believe it would.
Andre
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