Laptop problems

The Mac friendly nature of this site is likely to change. My old G4 Power­Book wants to be retired, the hinge which broke off 18 months ago and has been glued back every few months since, has stopped func­tion­ing. The hinge is now so stiff that the glue will not hold it in place when you try to open the laptop. The Power­Book is used almost every­day on the bus to and from work and the remain­ing hinge will not keep the screen in place on that bumpy ride.

Over­all it is still a good laptop for my needs, G4/550 with 512Mb RAM and 40Mb hard drive run­ning Apache, My SQL and PHP does everything I want. So i will try to fix it, if not I will start look­ing for a replace­ment, I really would like to wait until the intel powered iBooks become avail­able, because all I really need is a 12″ Ibook. Light, ultra port­able and with more grunt than I need.

So to last me through until the the Intel powered iBooks become avail­able, I have bor­rowed an old Com­paq laptop from work. And even though it is half the age of my Power­Book it feels like a brick. Still it is only for the short term and to make things sim­pler for me on the backend (Apache, My SQL and PHP) I replaced win­dows with Ubuntu. Which as John Oxton men­tioned is very brown. It was the easi­est Linux install­a­tion I had ever done. What sur­prised me was that it did not come with My SQL or PHP and Apache is not in the default install pack­age, unlike OsX. It was then I real­ised Ubuntu is aimed right at the desktop mar­ket. Simple, straight for­ward install­a­tion with no decisions mak­ing for your aver­age (first time) user. So I have to make a decision, get the pack­ages I need for Ubuntu or get another Linux dis­tri­bu­tion. That will depend what is avail­able at the local newsagent.

I will not be without a Mac, I will still use the battered Power­Book along with an ancient blue and white G3/350 rev2 at home and an even older G3/300 rev1 at work. I will use them for test­ing when I can, but if I do most my work on a mix of PC’s and Linux, I am bound to missed the odd mac friendly thing, so let me know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.