> On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 08:39:19PM -0800, Heather wrote: > > Vendors right off the top of my head: Ascentia (sp?), Imperial, Kachinatech > > (but the model they sell is far slower than you want), Dell if you twist > > their arm, ARM Computer. I'm sure there are a few more, maybe I'll bother > > to look at the hardware howto and narrow it down sometime. > > Apple makes laptops that run debian-powerpc quite nicely, but are pretty > pricey :( Good battery life and no noisy power-sucking fans though. > > Ascentia was a line of laptops made by AST. AST is out of business now. > Good thing, too, according to this tremendously pissed off customer: > http://www.netppl.fi/~findians/paper.html The Ascentias are still listed in LAPTOP magazine's chart this last month. Unless someone else took up the product line, this company failure was recent?
> I don't know if all AST laptops suck as much as this guy says they do, but > my AST Ascentia 810N is, um, ok. It has a nice trackball, not a little > mouse nipple in the middle of the keyboard, and it runs cool enough to be > called a laptop (even for people wearing shorts :). The biggest problem is > that I can't upgrade the RAM past 20MB :( I got it for only 300 $ last > year, so I'd say it's worth it. > > Anyway, you [Yannick] might want to consider a used laptop unless you have > a good reason for needing an 800MHz Pentium III. You can get a pretty good > machine for a whole lot less than you'd pay for a new one. My next laptop > will probably be a powerpc or an AMD K6-2 (or some other K6-* processor). Kachinatech's Portare is a KG-2, 3 dif't speeds available, memory total looked a little wimpy, but acceptible to most needs when pumped up. And Kachina preloads Debian... > If you ever need to seriously crunch anything, just ssh to a powerful > desktop box. Definitely. Preferably under screen, then power detach and come back later when its crunching is done. * Heather Stern * star@ many places...
