Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gentoo on a macbook air

[Alan McKinnon]

On Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:14:27 +0800
William Kenworthy <billk@×××××××××.au> wrote:

> On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 19:03 +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
> > The boss just told me my beloved 2007 sony vaio has got to go (and
> > 600Mhz just doesnt cut it anymore when trying to run more than 1
> > vm !)
> >
> > He is offering a new 11" macbook air which I have never even had a
> > look at, or be able to identify if I saw one - well he got me to
> > say at least I should look at it rather than a Dell :)

I can give you some feedback on working with those ultra-notebooks.
Sure, this is based on a Samsung Series 9 but that is a blatant ripoff
of the Air anyway (right now to the funky Apple touchpad)

As a portable device, they are awesome. As a backup device, they are
uber-awesome. As a primary workstation for tech types, they are not so
awesome.

The screen display is limited to around 1300x800 or so which is fine if
you run most apps maximized anyway. Adding a second monitor usually
requires a dongle as does an RJ45 wired connection (there just isn't
enough thickness to the machine to put the connectors), and there's no
such thing as a docking station. USB is limited, usually to just two
ports and on the Samsung you can only boot off one of them - the USB
2.0 one.

Battery life is excellent. Keyboards are awesome. Video cards tend to
be crap (something has to give to extend the battery life and the video
card is by far the easiest to turn down and reduce power usage). The
SSDs are awesome, if you have never used one before you *will* be
pleasantly surprised.

Linus has a Mac Air (was reading a blog post from him just this
morning) and he got OpenSUSE installed on it. So as long as you can get
it to boot from a USB device, you should be OK. Gentoo supports all the
fancy disk tools you need to get UEFI and GPT working.

> >
> > Googling seems to imply that I can get rid of the apple stuff and
> > install linux but I have not found any up to date gentoo info yet
> > (except these are UEFI, and the gentoo live media wont work) - does
> > anyone have any idea if gentoo  is doable on these, and no real
> > problems exist?
> >
> > They do seem a bit feature "free" (no CD drive etc) which reduces
> > the options when trying to install.
> >
> > BillK
> >
> >
>
>
>



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com