I agree that Apple hires the best industrial designers out there and
their computers have always stood out and look great. I am still
pondering whether the MacbookPro is $1,000 more great
Although I must say I’m pretty biased about opinion towards Apple, I
have been using about every operating system out there and found
MacOS to strike the delicate balance between a graphical user
interface and the raw unix power. I’ve had my fair share of Mac and
PC laptops (HP, Dell, Sony) and the only one that still runs very
smoothly after four years without any costs, is my PowerBook 867, I
still use it every day for more than 11 hours. Also, I started out
with MacOS 10.2 and upgrading to a new version of the MacOS has made
my PowerBook faster each time, this can’t be said from Windows or Linux.
To put it in one sentence, I don’t mind the $1000 extra if it allows
me to save more than that by using my Mac for a few years longer.
The only question I have about FreeBSD is whether it plays well on
laptops and if so which ones. I did a bit of googling on the subject
and I don’t see any newer laptops on the list. I’d like to go with
coreduo with 667MHz RAM. Ofcourse an obvious option is the Macbook
Pro. I was a bit surprised to see that most good brand name coreduo
laptops with similar specs of a Macbook Pro are atleast as expensive.
I am very familiar with and addicted linux/emacs. apt-get(on Debian)
and all things Linux. So this can be painful transition both on my
pocket book and my psyche
I use FreeBSD on all our servers because it’s the best free OS for
amd64,
providing you have compatible hardware. I also use it on my desktop,
but
that’s only because they won’t buy me a Mac
I’ve never used apt-get, but FreeBSD ports is great and DarwinPorts is
at
least as good. It doesn’t have as many ports, but everything you need
for
Rails is in there.
As much as I like FreeBSD and KDE, it can still take a lot of work to
get
running on the desktop (that said, I’ve never used a Linux desktop to
compare). PCBSD may interest you ( http://www.pcbsd.org/ ) as the final
release is due soon. Hopefully they won’t be long behind the 6.1
release.
FreeBSD now has a binary Java package which means installing RadRails is
a
no-brainer.
Overall though, if you want a laptop for Rails development I’d say if
you are
prepared to spend the money then definitely go with the MacBook Pro. OS
X is
absolutely rock solid, and you get to run TextMate
I’ve been contemplating a move from Debian Sarge stable to either
Debian Unstable, Gentoo or FreeBSD for my workstations. I am thinking
of doing this in anticipation of ruby-1.8.4 being required for rails
development. (not yet but may be at 1.2?) I don’t think Sarge will be
upgraded to it any time soon, if at all. Gentoo seems great but the
initial build can be a pain.
Gentoo “stable” is currently still at Rails 1.0, I think. Gentoo is
pretty good about getting version bumps into the unstable/testing
repository, if that matters to you. For example, Rails 1.1.2 was
available in Portage a day or so after it escaped from DHH and company.
If you’ve got a few machines, you can minimize the pain of Gentoo
compilation with “distcc” and “ccache” and “buildpkg” features. It’s a
tad tricky to set up, but you can even do the initial build with
“distcc” and “ccache”.
For that matter, you don’t lose a heck of a lot by using “O2” for
optimization and compiling everything for “i686”, which will run on a P2
or better. I’ve got three different types of machines, and I have had
good luck with the i686 trick.
Just out of curiosity, since you mentioned Debian and Gentoo, what about
the “other community distro,” Fedora?
The only question I have about FreeBSD is whether it plays well on
laptops and if so which ones. I did a bit of googling on the subject
and I don’t see any newer laptops on the list. I’d like to go with
coreduo with 667MHz RAM. Ofcourse an obvious option is the Macbook
Pro. I was a bit surprised to see that most good brand name coreduo
laptops with similar specs of a Macbook Pro are atleast as expensive.
I am very familiar with and addicted linux/emacs. apt-get(on Debian)
and all things Linux. So this can be painful transition both on my
pocket book and my psyche
Hey, if you want to spend money on a laptop, get a nice 64-bit Turion
with a wide-screen.
I ran Gentoo for a number of months, and switched because it became a
part
time job to administer my machine. I would say go with a Debian based
distro.
As I’m finishing a new web I’m testing the deployment using Debian Sarge
(I used windows for development) and found it easy (even to setup
lighttpd). I followed the instructions written here:
You should really compare again. You will see that the MacBook Pro has
actually similar price as laptops with similar hardware. A quick
glance at dell.com makes the price for a similar dell to be around
$1800 and you still have left to add external stuff to have the built
in features of a MBP.
Apple is more expensive yes. But it’s only like $150 more expensive at
most.
Will, I tried to get Apache working previously with Debian and
performance was horrible. This box was also serving PHP stuff. I
implemented Lighttpd and it works well, but I have some plesk driven
boxes that I would like to get an Apache solution going. So you would
recommend giving it another try?
I tried apache + mod_fcgi about a year ago and the stability was lousy
so I switched to lighttpd.
Now I am using apache + mod_fcgid and for what I am using it for it is
fine. It has been completely stable and there have been no performance
issues. None of my sites are particularly heavily used however so YMMV.
If you have lighttpd working then you may aswell stick with it unless
you need a feature that only apache supports or does better.
time job to administer my machine. I would say go with a Debian based
distro.
unless you get a macbook, or any new hardware really. then i’d want
gentoo - spyderous’s overlay has some trunk ebuilds for xorg and with
them you can get XGL running on the MacBook…
just setting it up for a friend. the 1.83g Duo compiled glibc in 25.5
minutes… for comparison, my (both 2.0g amd64) notebook/shuttle
connected via distcc took 22 minutes. so its pretty fast…
