Re: Advice on a iBook ...
On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, [iso-8859-1] Rogério Brito wrote:
> But I still have questions regarding these notebooks with
> Linux.
[...]
> 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?
The battery life on both is phenomenal. On the powerbook g4 I get 3 hours
30 minutes of normal usage under MacOS 9. Under linux I get approximately
3 hours. Even when playing DVDs I get over 3 hours in MacOS 9. The iBook
has even lower power consumption and its battery life is outrageous. The
batteries are small enough that you could carry a spare in a laptop case
and work an entire workday on batteries alone.
> 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)?
DVD playing works in MacOS 9, MacOS X, and Debian PPC on the titanium.
You can play DVDs with the iBook under MacOS 9/X. You can't play DVDs
with Linux on the iBook because the CPU power just isn't there, and the
various Linux DVD players haven't been optimized for that hardware.
Of course the iBook comes with a CD-RW/DVD combo drive which is a nice
plus!
Debian PPC is a relative breeze to install. In use Debian is a great
distro and you won't notice the difference between the x86 and PPC
variants.
One nice thing in Linux's favor is that you can play DVDs on the external
screen in Linux (with the TiBook), whereas you cannot do so in MacOS X
10.1! In 10.0 you can't play DVDs at all. Take that, Apple.
-jwb
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