I have an external hard drive, formatted as FAT32, which has my music collection on it.  I let iTunes import everything and "organize" it, using BIGASSDISK:Music as the "iTunes Music Folder Location".

Now that I have a laptop, which will not always be connected to the external hard drive, what is the best general strategy for this?

The requirements are: When the hard drive is available, I can play the music from iTunes with a minimum of fuss.  When the hard drive is not available, I don't have to do anything differently.

I suppose a bonus would be an easy way of selecting a subset of music to copy to the laptop's hdd for portable enjoyment.  Also, I will use the laptop for ripping and purchasing/downloading/"backing up", so I need to be able to easily be able to add new music to the master location.  I could probably do this with a relatively straightforward cron job.

The only semi-elegant thing I've come up with is to connect the external HDD to my PC and reboot into windows, fire up iTunes, and share it from there, then listen to it via streaming when I'm on the home network.  But the thought of having my PC run windows 24x7 does not appeal to me very much (i.e., not at all).  iTunes under WINE or some hippie software that is capable of presenting an iTunes usable stream served from Lunix would be better yet, if not perfect.