Looking for Laptop Suggestions

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 06:58 -0700, Mark Phillips wrote:
> My oldest is heading off to college in the Fall, and she needs to take
> a laptop with her. She has used Linux all her life, but only from
> Gnome, so Windows, Mac, Linux are all "the same" to her. She is a
> journalist, not a computer geek. Anyway, one significant requirement
> is for iTunes to work with her iTouch (i.e. buy music and download to
> her iTouch). I have not been able to get Wine/iTunes to work with
> Debian, so I have resorted to a single Windows computer just for a few
> games and iTunes at home. 
> 
>  
> Any recommendations (1) for laptops and (2) how to keep her using
> Linux and not shelling out extra bucks for a Mac, or heaven forbid, a
> Windows machine?
----
The only growth segment is in the netbook area and given the low cost, good battery life and ultra portability of a netbook, I would definitely recommend one.

I have an Acer Aspire One which was $350 w/ Windows, 160 Gb HD, and 1 Gb
RAM and I partitioned the hard drive, giving Windows 32 Gb, 80 Gb for
'media' (formatted also to NTFS) and the rest is for Linux.

Wine/iTunes isn't realistic. I tend to think of Wine as desperation
software.

Rhythmbox and gtkpod are able to sync with iPod's and I seem to recall
that there was some slowness to backporting the changes Apple made to
the iPhone and iPod Touch device synchronization but it probably is
working now (I have a 5th Gen iPod so I can't tell you).

I actually mostly use Windows to sync my iPod but the data is on the
media partition and I use Rhythmbox and/or Amarok to play it or I
suppose iTunes if I actually boot into Windows which is rare.

mt-daapd can also read the music data and share it without other iTunes
users which is pretty cool actually.

If you buy a netbook, you would probably want an external DVD drive as
they do not come with a DVD drive. You can always hook up a
keyboard/screen/mouse when at home base...which I do...my KVM.

Also, you would want to stay with some bleeding edge Linux stuff for a
netbook because things are changing rapidly and they are paying
attention to details like suspend to disk/ram, wireless connections and
limited amounts of screen real estate. I have Fedora 11-Beta on mine but
I would suspect that Ubuntu 9.04 would do well and Mandriva has a 'mini'
version.

As for jounalism...she should re-evaluate because it is an industry in a
death spiral.

Craig


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