Re: Laptop recommendations for GHC hacking?

catamorphism:
> Hello all,
> I'm in the market for a new laptop, and since I'll mainly be using it
> to hack on GHC and other Haskell projects, I thought I would ask what
> other people are using. One shouldn't really need a specialized
> machine for this, but since my ancient PowerBook G4 (where "ancient"
> is defined as "four years old") running Mac OS 10.2.1 has so far cost
> me several days of work trying to build the HEAD on it, I figured that
> it was both time to get something newer and a good time to figure out
> which OS/machine combination would save me that amount of work in the
> future. I'm trying to spend under $600, get as much RAM as possible,
> and not use a proprietary OS (this leaves me with */Linux or *BSD as
> the best options, but I have no idea which flavor will save me the
> most time spent configuring and reinstalling things -- that's my
> priority, as I've wasted enough of my life on that sort of activity
> already).

FWIW, I use an x86 Thinkpad X31. I quite like the thinkpad X series, and
would buy another. 

In regards not having to fuss about ports, an x86 running linux (debian)
is probably the easiest set up. Keeping an eye out for a dual core
machine might be a good idea too, in this age of concurrency.

-- Don