Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:
I have a G4 17" Titanic here. I tried to install Woody on, but failed because it didn't recognise the hard drive:-('ello, I am trying to justify buying a new PowerBook G4 (1.5GHz) over a far cheaper x86 laptop. I'm buying it for my final year at University (I use a laptop in lectures because I'm visually impaired and also my project requires me to be able to work in a number of places where desktops may not be available). It'll be my only computer whilst I'm there.
I've not tried Sarge.I'm not keen on the box itself (the mouse is on the turps, I swear it), and the single-button mouse I do not like at all. I've not persisted in Linux on it because OSX does so many things so well. I walk up to a wireless LAN (we use it at work) and it connects. I plug in a cable, it immediately gets an IP address. I took it into a camera shop, selected a camera and plugged it in, iphoto popped up and I could get the photos out of it. Configuring a USB printer (LJ1200) took seconds. USB disks just work.
At the commandline, much of what I learned on Linux applies - it uses BSD software rather than GNU in many cases so there are some differences there, and instead of cdrecord there's hdiutil & c.
I don't like Safari overmuch, but there's Mozilla and Firefox, right up-to-date. Thunderbird's available but I've only used that on Linux. There;s quite a selection of other free software available. OOo has been lagging, I'm not sure that the current release is available yet.
The one thing Linux did better is support my Logitech USB mouse. On OSX I had to install the driver.
Oh, there's speech software there too. In your circumstances I think I'd stay with OSX.
If you want a box to hack on Linux and can't be satisfied using much the same tools on OSX, then that's another matter.
-- Cheers John -- spambait 1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au