I'd love to tote a 'bells and whistles' sub-notebook though the ?800.00 plus price tag for a 10-12" screen machine which can effectively run XP or Vista and CS4 is too much considering I already own a large Tosh notebook (which I'm unwilling to haul overseas...) and two powerful desktops. So I'm considering a cheaper, less capable sub-notebook, perhaps something around the ?250.00 mark. Clearly the specification of such a machine is going to to be limited but by running Linux (which only occupies a gig of HHD), Wine (to run windows programs under the Linux OS) and Lightroom 2 to view RAW files (which only requires a gig of RAM and a gig of HHD) the limited specification of a cheaper machine would seem, on paper, to work. An option to the Wine / Lightroom combo would be to run a RAW capable Linux application like Bibble. I have absolutely no experience of Linux so I'd be gratefull to hear from anyone who may have considered this option, perhaps tried it and what opinions you may have formed. Many thanks in advance, Tim
I have a Macbook Pro and I use Aperture 2.0 for my DSLR so I have never tried Lightroom or Bibble (never heard of Bibble until now...cool!). You may or may not have luck running Lightroom through Wine. Your best bet would be to check the appdb at http://appdb.winehq.org and see if anyone else has successfully installed/run it, as well as any gotchas/limitations they have discovered along the way. Google might also help too. You might consider running a virtual machine as well. VMware server can be installed for free, and if you don't install a ton of programs you can get away with a Windows VM that only takes up a few gigs. If you want to try Lightroom then perhaps you have a spare machine to install Linux on (or some spare hard drive space that you can partition your machine and then dual-boot Windows and Linux) and try running Lightroom with Wine *before* you spend the money on a new machine only to find out it doesn't work. I would recommend sticking with distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora as there are many pre-compiled binaries available for them. If you go with another distribution like Gentoo or Slackware then you are going to be compiling your own software very often, which is not for the faint of heart (or the newbie). It looks like I can download a 30 day trial of Lightroom so I suppose I could download that and attempt to install it via Wine. Maybe I will give that a shot and then post the results...