My laptop will probably be on the market in about six months as I'll be converting to the dark side and getting a MacBook - dual-booting Linux and OS X of course.

My current laptop is over a year old now but it's done me brilliantly, it was a test-bed for my quad-boot experiment (XP Media Centre, Visa Business, Fedora Linux and OS X Hackintosh) and it's still going strong now I've upgraded it to 2GB of RAM. The 120GB hard drive means I've got enough space for three operating systems (I got rid of the Hackintosh because I needed the space) and all of my music and documents. The only reason I'm ditching it is because I'm fed up with having to lug it around - the 13" MacBook is far more portable.

Here's a geek question, before I go down the linux route, is there PC based software that will enable me to use apple mac products, or just run it as a mac alltogether?

The lads use garageband for early demos and I feel left out.

Speaking of demo recording...

H.O.D. Feemo wrote:Here's a geek question, before I go down the linux route, is there PC based software that will enable me to use apple mac products, or just run it as a mac alltogether?

The lads use garageband for early demos and I feel left out.

Not without going the whole hog and doing a Hackintosh install - which is basically just installing a hacked version of OS X onto PC hardware. From personal experience though this is more than likely more trouble than it's worth. If you're serious about it, check out InsanelyMac.

If you're going down the Linux route, have a read of my blog about transitioning tips. For distros, I would really recommend Fedora - it's a spin-off from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so it comes with that pedigree. A lot of people are picking up Ubuntu now though, it has a reputation for being pretty user-friendly, though I haven't tried it to any great degree myself

H.O.D. Feemo wrote:Here's a geek question, before I go down the linux route, is there PC based software that will enable me to use apple mac products, or just run it as a mac alltogether?

The lads use garageband for early demos and I feel left out.

Virtual machine it?

I await the great sky god's confirmation or destruction of this statement.

Yeah, i started using ubuntu fairly recently and craig has been a very helpful chappy with it.

It is fairly off putting just jumping right in, so dual boot maybe the option.

It will be eventually on my main, as soon as i can find out where all of my cat5's have gone so i can network the thing to get drivers etc.