Re: Laptop recommendations?

Sean McNeil writes:
 > On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 14:16, George Hartzell wrote:
 > > Peter Schultz writes:
 > >  > How far off are we from a stable version of FreeBSD PPC?  Apple's 
 > >  > laptops are sweet.
 > > 
 > > Except for the D#_at_% caps lock key.  It's IN THE WRONG PLACE and
 > > apparent best tool for swapping it around (uControl) doesn't work
 > > reliably and the dang led stays on anyway....
 > 
 > Huh?  I'm looking at my powerbook right now and the caps lock key is in
 > the exact same place as it is on my logitec keyboard and my compaq
 > laptop.  Only difference that I see is the backspace key says delete and
 > there is no "delete" key that kills the character on the cursor.

Yeah, I'm an old weirdo [who also uses emacs a lot].  I grew up with
the control key being that big sucker just to the left of the 'A' key,
and reaching down and under to the bottom row bothers my left
wrist/hand.  I'm otherwise keyboard agnostic (I don't care where the
esc key is, I just use ctrl-[ and I'm used to figuring out just what
the BS/Del key sends) but the ctrl key is important.  Fortunately, on
PC hardware, it's easy enough to get it where i want/like/need it.

 > > I've been told that the behaviour is in the firmware and is
 > > unavoidable w/out drastic measures.
 > 
 > I'd say this is a minor nit that you could get use to over time.
 > [...]

It may well be a minor nit, but they're not *your* fingers that start
tingling.  It's enough to keep me from treating my 15" powerbook as my
day-to-day unix machine.  Well, that and trying to live w/ the weird
unix environment, which is a pale imitation of FreeBSD and our
incredible ports tree.  It makes a great mac though (digital imaging,
photoshop, etc...).

The powerbook hardware *is* nice.  FreeBSD/PPC and the powerbook might
well be a different story (I could live w/ the led staying lit if that
key were an otherwise reliable ctrl...).

I've settled in to being quite happy with my T42p.  I'd happily trade
the parallel port for firewire, and I wish that s4bios worked, but
otherwise it's awfully nice!

g.