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February 18, 2005

New PowerBook on the Way!

I just ordered a new PowerBook to replace my aging 15-inch 667MHz/512Mb PowerBook. This is what I got:

- 15 inch screen
- 1.5GHz G4
- 1GB RAM
- 80GB 5400RPM hard drive
- ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 w/64MB VRAM
- SuperDrive
- Airport

I haven't had much time to work on Mozilla stuff lately, but this will help me take advantage of what time I do have. Its sad that this nearly-top-of-the-line Apple setup will probably have way worse compile times for Mozilla products than top-of-the-line PC laptop offerings, but oh well. I've found Apple hardware to be wonderfully designed and reliable, and when I need something other than Linux (which should run fine on my PowerBook) I'd much prefer Mac OS X over Windows.

Posted by josh at February 18, 2005 1:54 PM

Comments

One good PowerBook always deserves another!

Posted by: sdkaneda at February 18, 2005 2:32 PM

if you'd like remote acceess to a dual-g4 i have (for builds), please drop me a line.

Posted by: louis bennett at February 18, 2005 3:05 PM

expect to not have use of your airport extreme under linux (broadcom chipset); and possibly your trackpad (new usb versus adb). the new ubuntu live cds (hoary) do not play nice with the new trackpads... :/

other than that, i have a new 12" and i love it :)

Posted by: Mitch at February 18, 2005 4:17 PM

I wish I could afford a PowerBook... even a 667MHz/512Mb one...

Instead I'm just another sap stuck on Windows

Posted by: Derek at February 18, 2005 6:04 PM

I think fixing the trackpad drivers under Linux sounds like a fun project! Seriously. It does sounds fun :)

Posted by: Josh Aas at February 19, 2005 3:35 PM

If you have a few spare Macs (or Linux boxes), you can try distcc - http://distcc.samba.org/ - it will offload some of the compile tasks to those machines. Of course, this doesn't help if you're sitting with your Powerbook on the beach or in a restaurant or somewhere, lucky bastard :-)

Also you can try ccache - http://ccache.samba.org/ - which will cache the compiled object files and re-use them, even if you do a clean on the entire Mozilla tree. It speeds things up considerably. But I haven't used that to compile Mozilla (only other stuff).

Posted by: Terence Tan at February 21, 2005 5:09 PM

I got my first Mac last September, a PowerBook 12" - really an amazing computer! Loving OS X after years of Windows. However, I really had no idea you can run Linux on them! Seems kind of logical I suppose, what with it being UNIX and all.

Hope you enjoy it!

Posted by: Tom Edwards at February 23, 2005 1:36 PM