[Beowulf] Linux laptops, and M$ advertisement

[Peter St. John]

Andrew,
Thanks, yeah, people seem to be "voting" for Thinkpads.

But, is it 8-year-old SON proof? :-)

Since besides RGB, IBM is the **other** 600-lb Gorilla of Linux Advocacy
(installing on a wristwatch, booting 1k instances thru VMWare on a 390,
etc), it saddens me that Thinkpads only come in a choice of M$ XP Home, M$
XP Pro, M$ Vista Home, etc. I thought that the deal of HD manufacturers
being contractually obliged to install M$, on the grounds that every
customer must be presumed to **intend** installing M$ but may be conspiring
to subvert licensing, had gone away? Evidently not. You'd think if anyone
could resist that it would be IBM.

Peter

P.S. with all due respect to Torvalds, I wish I could type "Open Source
Flavors of Unix" but it's just too long a sentence fragment. And I doubt
"OSFU" will catch on. Maybe GnuFU could? My White-Eyebrow Style GnuFU
defeats your Looming Borg Style!!


On 4/16/07, Andrew M.A. Cater <amacater at galactic.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 02:22:59PM -0400, Peter St. John wrote:
> >
> > Be all that as it may, I"m wondering what laptop to get. There are two
> > issues: one, that it used to be scary to get all the device drivers for
> > linux (maybe not anymore); and two, that one would prefer not to pay the
> tax
> > associated with the disk manufacturer contracting to preinstall Vista
> etc.
> > Toshiba, which used to be a fair linux platform IIRC, promotes itself as
> the
> > Premier Vista Notebook now (understandably).
> >
> > I ran into http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux-laptop-lc2100.html via a
> > couple routes but of course it's a no-frills site, dunno what it wouuld
> be
> > like to find/get accessories etc. Anyone want to pitch me their laptop
> > favorite?
> >
>
> I had a long chat recently with one of the UK distributors (Linux
> Emporium).
>
> They stock Lenovo "own brand" and Thinkpad. They support and install
> Ubuntu 6.06 LTS because they find the others change too radically and
> sometimes break on hardware changes as well. At least with the LTS
> release, they can rely on manufacturer support.
>
> Thinkpads are solid and have "geek cred": at one Linux show I was at,
> the Debian stand had 6 Thinkpads of various vintages and a Sony Vaio.
>
> Certainly the bare-bones basic Thinkpad I have is 8 year old daughter
> proof :)
>
> Andy
>
> > Thanks,
> > Peter
>
>
>
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