[PD] pd/Gem Laptop HW recomondations

ben at ekran.org ben at ekran.org
Thu Oct 2 20:01:19 CEST 2003


Hey All,

I'm currently researching Laptop HW for pd/Gem studd and wanted to get
the opinions of the developers/users. The machine should support all the
future goodies of pd/Gem for the next couple years, including the
eventual addition of pixel/vertex-shader stuff.

I've really got two choices, apple powerbook (15") and a PC laptop with
a Nvidia card under linux. I do think the Radeon 9600 is certainly a
better card (by far), but for linux I'm stuck with the Nvidia HW because
they have the only fully-functional drivers.

I have not found much in PC land that is comparable to the powerbook (in
terms of graphics performance (is Geforce FX 5600 Go the best?) and size
to performance ratio.) A laptop that is easily traveled with a nice 15"
display would be needed. Firewire would be nessesary (but with a chipset
supported by linux dv1394). Anyone having any recomondations on such a
PC laptop, preferably from someone who is running linux and Gem on it
now.

There are pretty well only 2-3 main things keeping me away from the
powerbook:

#1 The PD gui is terrible, the slowest and buggiest tcl/tk of all the
platforms. :(
#2 I would prefer to run a fully open-source OS...

#3 I am doing a lot of serial interface stuff with HW, and until we get
a keyspan compatible comport object for PD on OSX there is not much I
can do on that end.

The HW is really nice, and as far as I can tell the radeon 9600 is way
ahead of the nvidia 5600 go. But I'm not sure if this is enough to
offset the issues with the pd gui... (yes I could run GripD, but that is
a seperate interfacing problem) I can't hardly use my Gem GOPs on OSX
(512Ram, 733Mhz, Geforce2 MX), compared to great results on my old Duron
800 with the same graphics card at home...

So I'm really torn here, anyone have an suggestions?

Thanks
Ben







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