Photo editing using the GIMP - Requirements?

[E1uSiV3]

Hi folks,

My missus is into putting pencil to paper and i recently loded up the GIMP onto my mac mini for her to play with. Looking at other posts about editing + requirements i thought i would start my own thread on the topic.

I have just started showing her the joys of alpha channels and layering and remembered about a comment i read on edugeek somewhere about photoshop + rendering layers killing mac minis.

To cut a long story short, im thinking bout buying her an ibook and a wacom tablet but now im thinking she might require something with more poke like a higher end powerbook.

Any comments/suggestions would be welcomed

[openhgs]

Take the cheap and easy route. Buy a second-hand laptop, load up a nice light Linux distro and let her use that for her Gimp work. I run Redhat 7.1 on a Toshiba Satellite S1670 which I got on ebay for a song and it runs like a dream, almost as fast as FC3 on my P4 tower. OpenOffice is slow on the laptop, so I simply use StarOffice instead.

[E1uSiV3]

Has gotta be a mac mate, ive invested in software she uses for college etc and tbh she has just got to grips with aqua, i dont want to introduce her to yet another OS and desktop

[Ric_]

Since the iBooks have G4 processors (as do all but the macBook Pros) that would surely be sufficient - especially if you cram it full of RAM.

Photoshop also doesn't have native support for the Intel chip yet so an Intel-based machine would be wasted somewhat.