Looking for Laptop Suggestions

[Joe]

I couldn't agree less. Sure it'll be powerful enough for her, no doubt,
but she's going to be typing up documents for school, and the netbook
keyboards are much smaller than a real keyboard. She could get used to
it or even use an external keyboard when she's working, but why force
her to go through all that?

If you're seriously looking at a netbook, at least get one with a (near)
full-size keyboard. I'd consider spending the extra cash on a "real"
laptop. If you want something light, got one with a 13.3 inch screen.
Just my 2 cents.

As for bands, I'm loving my Samsung X360, overall I've been happy with
Dell in the past and I really liked the Lenovo U330, although I skipped
it because I read that Lenovo has absolutely no love for Linux (and the
support for that machine seemed to back up what I read). System76 seems
to be well-liked within the group. Had not found such an amazing deal on
my X360, I probably would have hit them up.

-Joe

Craig White wrote:
> 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
> 
>