Re: Advice on a iBook ...

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

On Oct 16 2001, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> Even with Linux, the choice isn't so hard, with a growing amount of
> software supporting Altivec. In particular, watching DVDs is
> certainly much more of a pleasure on a TiBook now than it will
> probably ever be on a G3 Notebook.

	Oh, I wasn't the original poster, but I'm following this
	thread with attention, since I might in the near future
	purchase an Apple notebook (probably an iBook2, given my quite
	limited budget of being a graduate student) and the
	recommendations here are quite valuable.

	But I still have questions regarding these notebooks with
	Linux.

	While I am a moderately experienced system administrator and
	an excited user of Debian since the 1.1 days, I'm *quite* new
	to the PowerPC platform (but trying to catch up quickly) and I
	would appreciate if you could tell me more about the relative
	performance of the processors.

	For instance, some time ago I asked what x86 (mobile)
	processor the iBook2's could be compared to and I received all
	answers from a Celeron 300 to a Pentium III 800. :-/ What is
	a realistic figure?

	I also understand that GCC may not be as mature for PowerPC as
	it is for x86, but is the difference considerable?

	Let me say that I'm not interested in a powerhouse. I just
	want to have a simple desktop, with simple browsing of the web
	(perhaps using Mozilla, presently using Opera), reading
	e-mail, working with Emacs, writing my own programs, typing my
	things with LaTeX, working with some database etc. Quite
	simple things.

	My most advanced projects as a user are watching DivX movies,
	encoding MP3s with lame and playing files with xmms. I'd like
	to take the lowest (i.e., cheapest) processor that could make
	me watch the DivX movies without skipping.

	I know that a Celeron 466 can do that reasonably well, and I
	would like to have that kind of functionality in my future
	notebook.

	Battery life is more of a concern than processing power for me
	and the ads from Apple lead me to think that this may be a
	point where the iBook2 shines (is that true in the real
	world?). What about the TiBook?

	And what is the status of playing DVDs with an iBook2 or a
	TiBook? What about the region thing (i.e., the drives are
	unfortunately RPC2, right)?


	Thanks for any comments, Roger...

-- 
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  Rogério Brito - rbrito@ime.usp.br - http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/
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