[LAU] Light laptop setup ?

[lanas]

All,

  Since we'll be buying a laptop for our oldest son's birthday I
though heck, perhaps I can piggyback on it when he's not using it
and maybe have an easy-to-use, light, way of recording sketches
and improvs on some weekends mornings in the living room.  And
hopefully being able to take some of that to the main
workstation's Ardour setup for further development.  Sketches
would be done using an accoustic guitar and a small MIDI
keyboard (using fluidsythn, zyn and perhaps linux sampler).

  So here I have a few questions.

1) What is the most easiest-to-setup MIDI/audio interface for a
laptop ?  Fedora 11 will be installed on the laptop.  The laptop
will probably be a dual core with 2 to 4 GB of RAM and some 300
GB hard disk.  The screen will probably 16".  This will not be a
top-of-the-line laptop.

2) What are the options to record accoustic guitar ?  Are a
traditional boom and mic the only way w/o having a built-in
pickup installed in the guitar ?

3) What would be the very smallest MIDI keyboard available ?  I
have an Axiom 25 although something even smaller would be nice.

4) What are the options to hearing stuff ?  So far I think that
the laptop's speakers, processed by Jamin could be OK.  Are there
any small/tiny external speakers for this kind of application ?

5) On the software side, there should be no problems in running
any audio app on modern laptops ?  Or are there distro/laptop
incompatibilities issues that would prevent jack from running for
instance ?

Finally, if there are any web sites dedicated to Linux laptop
audio recording, please let me know.

  Thanks for your suggestions/ideas/comments !

Cheers.