

Toshiba will ship flagship laptops with OpenSolaris - Create
http://www.itexaminer.com/sun-and-toshiba-ink-open-solaris-agreement.aspx

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gaius
I think this is great, tho' I'd never buy one; I think everyone who wants
Solaris on a laptop is already running it inside VirtualBox on OSX.

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Create
I strongly stick to "The Right to Read". To quote from the old-new thing, the
cisco affair:

"I fear the Cisco experience has done unseen damage to Stanford in the form of
creating inhibitions against sharing ideas, information and developments with
possible commercial value among our groups which have need to benefit from
each other's work."

Which is exactly what OSX is going against, with digital restrictions
management, the appstore idea and the rest.

Given the choice of windows tax or an outdated intel platform, I'd rather go
for this one -- it appears to be the only credible alternative to OS X,
supposedly working out of the box with dtrace (w/o arbitrary iTunes sh*) and
the rest: all being more or less open. Otherwise you need to rely on good luck
with the wifi/suspend/resume/acpi etc.

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gaius
That is true but to sell a product you need to be solving a problem, and the
people having the problem _I need Unix on a laptop_ already have pretty good
solutions available.

If you're willing to use Solaris/Linux in VirtualBox on Windows (just run it
fullscreen) then all the wireless/power management stuff is already solved too
for less money upfront that buying a MacBook, you can just use a cheap Dell.

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Create
You have a point: I am very sad to see (and this is not news, I admit), that
the problem "The Right to Read" is not perceived as a problem for people. Ten
years ago, it was a problem for the ACM community, and imho the problem only
got worse with time, because it is becoming latently ubiquitous. Maybe it does
have to do with the functional illiteracy, even among the ranks of the highly
literate.

You are also right about the cheap Dell: they do have ubuntu, but
price/performance pales in comparison to say, Vista. I can only hope, that the
Japanese market will embrace this product -- they generally have one of the
strongest FreeBSD culture, which might be enough for the kickstart.

