Re: Alternative to G3 ibook
Thanks very much for your email, Wojciech.
On 20/10/05, Wojciech Owczarek (owczi@owczi.net) wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 21:23:49 +0100
> Rory Campbell-Lange <rory@campbell-lange.net> wrote:
>
> > I would be grateful for any ideas of a relatively low cost, but
> > ideally reliable laptop (probably from the Apple range) with good
> > Linux support.
>
> I'm going to tell you a story about quite an old laptop ;)
>
> don't know about the 'cost' part, but if g3/500 suits you fine, then
> there is nothing as durable, reliable end expandible (!) as a PowerBook
> G3/2000 (FireWire), so called Pismo. And it's nicely supported. Here's
> how it looks:
>
> http://owczi.net/stuff/pismo3.jpg
I used to have a Pismo. The only slight negative from my point of view
is that it was quite a bit heavier than the G3 ibook range.
> the Pismo has already got an opinion of a cult laptop. You can stuff it
> with 1GB RAM, insert pretty much any ATA-5 compatible 2.5" HDD, it has
> space for an Apple Airport Wifi Card (not the Extreme one), plus one
> PCMCIA slot, 2 usb 1.1 ports, 2 fireWire 400 ports, external vga and
> s-video output (the s-video isn't suported by Linux). It has a bay with
> removable dvd/cd-rom drive that you can swap with a second battery. On a
> new battery this beauty stays alive for five hours. Imagine two
> batteries. You can even upgrade it to a G4/550 CPU which would make it
> better than the early G4 Titanium PowerBooks. It has been sold in two
> versions - with g3/400 and g3/500 CPUs, and some range of HDD capacity.
> And you can give it a combo or superdrive (dvd+cdrw)
Wow. I didn't realise how good the specs were! I'll see if I can find
one around.
>
> > I understand that the airport cards in the latest laptops aren't
> > supported, which is a shame.
>
> The Airport Extreme (latest laptops) indeed isn't supported well yet,
> however there have been reports of a success by using it via the Mac On
> Linux project. And there is some progress in an open source driver for
> it.
>
> The original airport (11MBit) works perfectly with Linux.
Thanks very much for the advice and information.
Regards,
Rory
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