On Mon, 30 Mar 2003, James Sparenberg wrote: > > I fail to see why a laptop needs vastly different software to a dekstop > > machine. > > > > Does Apple have a laptop version of OS X? > Yes
Please show me where I can buy it (and I don't mean bundled, OEM is OEM, Mandrake also does OEM, but this is not what we are talking about). > > Does windows have a laptop version of Windows XP? > Yes > Again, show me where I can buy it without a machine. > Problem is you don't see it. It's integrated into one. IE you buy the > product installed. But there are differences. So, are you talking OEM then? We have about 70 Windows machines here, only 4 of them came pre-installed, and many are laptops (although we avoid XP where we can, only 2 came with XP). A number of the rest are laptops. > Laptops, the hardware in them The rpms/features needed are perceptually > different from desktops. Realize this..... MDK for laptops will be 99% > the same as any other. In that rpms etc built here are just lined up in > a different order, or ignored. Things that could be dropped are ..... > support for NIC cards (non PCMCIA ones. Some on-board NIC drivers (RTL-3139D is quite popular on laptops) are identical to the drivers for PCI cards. You can also have PCI extensions on docking stations AFAIK. > Put in updates to pcmcia config > (and yes I sent in a large file to the MDK maintainer of missing / > changed cards.) You can run PCMCIA on desktops with PCI adapters. > Mostly though it's a marketing thing. SuSE now has the > Office release... I've looked at it..It's not very different from > personal. BUT the box says SuSE for Office. It must be better, right? But who is going to buy it. Can Mandrakesoft afford to market and support (think Vince ...) a seperate laptop distro? > Does have one nice point... no games. With disk space becoming a > premium.. this may ease the pain as well. BTW I've been testing Beta1 > et all and reporting since 6.x so yes I know it helps. Remember though > one thing. The people with the really big bucks, don't have time for > beta testing. aka the corporate world. They want results a product that > works. But how does this relate to laptops? Do they not want their desktop machines to just work? > In this world connecting to the company exchange server from > worldwide locations is a lot more important than 3d acceleration. We don't have Exchange, but we would be out of jobs if 3d acceleration did not work on our new 3d-modelling laptops (rapid prototyping of automotive components for one of our customers, we send people there to do modelling work for them). Granted, we don't use linux on them ... yet. Pro\E is coming to linux soon, and then we might. > Each > world has it's own need. Mandrakes need is money. I'm just letting > them know what people I know need. You really need yet another OS to support? The one thing about Linux is that it allows you to standardise, having multiple distros just because some hardware needs one extra driver or one extra user-space tool is ridiculous. If we do this, then should we remove SCSI and RAID drivers from the standard distro so we can make a server edition that has them (also, we can remove mt, mtx etc). None of the problems you have mentioned can not be addressed by a single x86 distro. The only thing that would help is more work being done on the apsects affecting laptops, but increasing everyone's workload to make a seperate distro is not going to help. -- |----------------Registered Linux User #182071-----------------| Buchan Milne Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager Cellphone * Work +27 82 472 2231 * +27 21 8828820x121 Stellenbosch Automotive Engineering http://www.cae.co.za GPG Key http://ranger.dnsalias.com/bgmilne.asc 1024D/60D204A7 2919 E232 5610 A038 87B1 72D6 AC92 BA50 60D2 04A7
