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 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
