From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-10-14T19:21:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Something portable for development purposes

On 14 Oct 2009, at 05:00, Aldric Giacomoni wrote:
> Alright.. I'm going to buy something to develop with, and use as a
> general thought-dump.
> I use Ruby and Ruby on Rails.. And I own a Rubymine license, so
> recommending a Mac for the sake of Textmate is a bit silly. I will
> listen candidly to all advice, though.
>
> What am I looking for? Oh.. A clear screen, anti-glare would be  
> awesome;
> the keys can't be too small; the battery life is between reasonable  
> and
> awesome; and it's light.
>
> I do appreciate your recommendations. Pretend money isn't a problem as
> long as it's under US$2,000 (Yeah, I don't think you can convince me  
> to
> buy a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air... But maybe you can!)

My current port-about is an MSI Wind u100 running Snow Leopard and  
packing a 9-cell extended battery. Assuming you want a USB DVD drive  
of some variety to use with it you could source the same for about  
$650 including the Snow Leopard license. Configuration is only a  
mildly black art these days (see http://forums.msiwind.net, currently  
offline but with all the relevant posts in google's cache) and you can  
be running full vanilla OS X with software update and hibernation in  
under a day if you don't require Windows. Linux is an easier dual-boot  
option although that's only necessary for VGA out.

I was carting this around at LSRC with Leopard installed and it worked  
a dream for coding. Now my poor MacBook fears a life of Windows and  
games is all that awaits it!

Alternately they're also very sweet machines with Ubuntu Netbook Remix  
9.04 which gives you access to the fully Ubuntu repos.

For those with larger fingers the Samsung netbooks have very good  
keyboards, although I think the screens are glossy. Or for some retro  
chic, the older IBM X series (X31/41) are hard-wearing, light, blessed  
with Thinkpad keyboards and still pack reasonable bang for software  
development. They run linux like a charm.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
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raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason