Red Hat Diaries/0001

Uh-oh II

Yeah, hi again, she's asleep and if I type quietly she won't hear me. She's exhausted and we're supposed to leave in a short while to check out some more boxes - for the umpteenth time. It's been a long couple of months.

We'd basically decided we wanted a few laptops, and back then the thought was that at least one would run Red Hat, but after 7.0 made a mess of its install on Tom Greene's box we really didn't know any more. SuSE was nicer to him (and he runs SuSE for the whole family today) and Mandrake was even nicer - on install that is. Still, the original idea of this project was dead before we started. Red Hat, the Microsoft of the Linuxes, was a wimpy product.

So one box to run Windows, right? And then another to run - run what? Well we didn't know. But we didn't know laptops either, so we set about learning. And I sent out some feelers.

A friend of mine runs a rather large network with netadmins running around with their laptops all over the place, and they'd been given Sony Vaios a couple of years ago and that didn't turn out too good. I'd heard sob stories about the Vaios on my own, so I wasn't surprised. But what was interesting was that this company set about studying the market, preparatory to a new massive purchase of notebooks.

Best of breed was the Omnibook 6100, concluded the report. At $3500 list this is hardly surprising. The Omni, like all the HP boxes, is configured with yesterday's news, but it did have FireWire and wireless. Another good box was the Gateway 9550 with much of the same and a huge 15.7' screen.

Farther down the line came Compaq and then Dell (with an increasingly worrisome support record), and most notable of all was that the study concluded that no box out there was good enough today - not when you factored in quality of manufacture, configuration, and reliability of support. The company decided to keep on sleeping with their Vaios for the time being.

So Syd and I knew what we wouldn't buy - we just didn't know what we would.

Hey she's up - gotta go.

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