Jaime Bemaras wrote:
Have you thought about a titanium powerbook? Depending on your price point, it could be worth looking into. Dual-booting with MockOS should be no problem, if that can be considered an MS-approved OS by your school (after all, it has Office, WindozeMedia, Internet Exploder...).Hello list, Evidently my last posting didn't make it to the list. I appologize if I end up double-posting. I am looking to acquire a laptop. I will need a dual boot system because my university only supports MS software (don't get me started).
Since most overflow-type security exploits are written for i386, alternative arches make it that much more difficult for crackers to get in, so where price and performance are comparable, it's worth considering. Oh- and there are lots of registers, and no shortage of IRQs on PPC! (or alpha or any other real RISC architecture...)
The drawbacks: it may be less straightforward to install, and some software might not "just work" because of endianness or signed/unsigned char bugs. Oh- and the 2.4 kernel requires patches (I think 2.4 is needed for smooth DVD playing), you may need to recompile things like xine-dvd-css, well, you get the idea.
See the debian-powerpc list archives for more on these challenges, and installation help on various hardware including laptops.
Zeen, -- -Adam P. GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe! <http://lyre.mit.edu/%7Epowell/The_Best_Stuff_In_The_World_Today_Cafe.ogg>