Hi jrong,
I am using WinXP, Mac (mini) and Redhat at the same time.
may I can summarize the the situation for you.
1. Go visit apple dot com and see your options if you want to choose the Mac route. If you want to add as little hardware as possible in order to save space, you may choose the Mac mini, it is really small.
Just need to add a KVM switch (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch) and your Mac and PC can share the same set of keyboard, monitor and mouse.
2. The new, current batch of Mac machines use Intel CPU just like your PC, you have many choices here:-
a. like dual booting between Linux and Win$ in your PC, using GRUB or Lilo in Linux, you can dual/multi- boot your Mac machines for Linux, MacOSX and Win$ using "bootcamp" from Apple.
b. or you may choose to run a system emulator software (now they have a new method called virtualization because of new hardware support from the CPU) like the "Paralllels" from parallels.com, it is not expensive, you can run Win$ or Intel based Linux distributions on top of your MacOSX by using the software Parallels, the guess OS (e.g. Redhat) runs like an application. Then you can run whatever softwares you like, Latex or KDE etc on your Linux, there may be certain degree of performance penalty though.
c. If you want to compile and run your Unix software on MacOSX, you may do so as the GCC complier for OSX is included in the installation disk, called the Xcode, it would be installed automatically. If you want to compile a Linux version of your code, you need to compile it within Linux using the Linux GCC compiler as the Mac is a BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) based kernel which is different from the Linux kernel hence the compilers are different.
c. In fact, a lot of Linux softwares have OSX version, even the heavy weight server softwares like Apache, php etc. If you really need to run some X11 based codes on the MacOSX directly, you have an option, using the X11 for Mac OS X,
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/x11/
d. I have been using KMail in the past, now I have switched to Thunderbird,
http://www.mozilla.org/download.html
It works like KMail, may be even better, may be you can give it a trial.
And the following link from Thunderbird tells you how to migrate from KMail to Thunderbird.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq#kmail
3. As some people have suggested, just switch to Mac and don't look back, despite the BSD kernel, and the beautiful appearance and user friendly interface, under the hood, it is an Unix, you can find most of the corresponding Linux counterparts from OSX, including the command line (terminal)interface, user management etc. Nevertheless, I must admit that the only drawback of using Linux is the monitor calibration and lack of colour space support in the GIMP (yet), you would benefit from the Mac after switching to OSX.
4. Last, good luck!
