About a Powerbook for debian..

[Datacom - Tavares <tavares@datacom-telematica.com.br>]

Hi..
A few days ago I started thinking about buying a new laptop to help me
stay connected while attending to conferences and moving from one place
to another.. 
Right now, I'm living in 2 places.. One in the weekends and the other
during the week.. My parent's home (weekends) is 300km from here and
here I have a home server 24hs up with a vnc session opened that I can
access from anywhere..

I always thought this was sufficient but now I'm in need of local
computer power to play videos, to help me in places where there's no
internet connection, etc ..

Since I already have a Libretto 70CT that took me 3 months to tune woody
on it and that is running sarge now, I'm already experienced with
debian.. Also, I run stable in another 2 machines of mine and unstable
in another 3 .. Libretto is really weak to do the job, but great with
its portability.. Great for using as a terminal at home running
vncviewer in fullscreen.. by the way, all my machines are ia32 and I
have no experience with linux on other architectures..

Since that, and because of my curiosity with different architectures and
toys, I'm thinking about buying a Powerbook G4 12" ..

12" because I really don't like big laptops and because it's cheaper :)

The things that are making me think twice before buying are:
- touchpad, I think it's possible to configure X to use other 2 keyboard
keys as the 2nd and 3rd buttons of the mouse.. but is it comfortable to
use like that?
- 12" accepts only 1024x768 while some 10" sony vaios accepts 1280x.. in
a smaller screen.. I think powerbook's screen could be better..
- java and java plugin on linux, people told me there's a ibm JVM.. is
it good? or is it better to run Mac-on-Linux with its VM and browser?
- is the airport supported on linux?

A friend of mine has an ibook and he showed me some features in MacOSX,
but no way I'll leave the freedom of debian for a macosx..

I asked him about hibernating and he told me his ibook has a "sleep"
function that stops the cpu and suspends to ram.. he also told that the
battery lasts more that a week on sleep mode.. he said there's no real
need for an hibernate on it.. Is he right?

Another question I have is about it's power..
- how is it comparable with a intel machine? better? worse? people
usually say the hardware has a better quality, but they don't compare
performance..

thanks ..

[]
JA Tavares