Squeak laptop advice

I'm about to have a two week vacation in Orlando, but would like to do
some Squeaking during that time. An option would be to take my current
laptop, which is an Apple G3 iBook. That is a bit heavy and slow by
today's standards, and since it can only run old VMs I would expect
(though I haven't tested) some problems with more recent images.

An alternative would be to buy a new machine, and in that case the focus
would be on Squeak. At the very low end are the Chromebooks and though
there are no VMs for them (as far as I know) I found out that it is
possible to install Linux on both the Intel (like the $199 Acer with a
1.1GHz Celeron) and ARM (like the $249 Samsung with a 1.7GHz Exynos 5)
versions. Though it seems that the ARM machine runs Linux a bit faster,
I imagine that Cog would be an option on the Celeron and so it might be
a better Squeak laptop.

Something that could be really interesting is a multitouch option, like
in the $499 11.6" Asus machine with a 1.4GHz Intel i3 processor. I don't
like that the operating system is Windows, but could certainly live with
that. Would a normal VM be able to pass the touch events to the image?
Without that, this hardware feature wouldn't be very useful.

Does anyone have any experience or tips to share?

-- Jecel

On 03.01.2013, at 15:42, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <[hidden email]> wrote:


I don't have advice on particular machines, but so far no desktop VM passes touch events to the image. The VM would have to be modified for that. The only multi-touch implementation I am aware of is in the iOS VM. I intended to implement multitouch for X11 on the XO-4 laptop, but haven't got around to it. Partially because the hardware is based on an infrared grid, so only a single touch is detected reliably, the second touch point is not entirely independent. That means that multi-touch support on the XO-4 isn't as attractive as e.g. on the iPad with its 11 independent touch points. Single-touch works fine, though, but since it gets translated to mouse events in deeper layers of the stack there is no special support needed.

- Bert -

My dream machine is:

http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon-touch/

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <[hidden email]> wrote:

13 MacBook Air weighs next to nothing and is very fast, but has relatively poor battery life.

On Jan 7, 2013, at 7:33 AM, Chris Muller <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey!

On 01/07/2013 04:33 PM, Chris Muller wrote:
> My dream machine is:
>
> http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon-touch/

Sliding a bit from Jecel's original request - because I think he was
shopping for something less expensive - but I have a Lenovo X220 since
april and I just love it. And it runs Linux perfectly, wrote a bit about it:

http://goran.krampe.se/2012/04/14/going-lenovo/

...now, since the X230 is out it seems the price of X220 has dropped a
bit too.

regards, Göran

PS. The IPS panel, the keyboard and the expansion options (memory,
battery, hdd etc) are probably the major points.

Hi Göran!  Aren't the Lenovo's fantastic?  So, I just bought my 4th
ThinkPad last year (2012) the T520 -- because I noticed that Lenovo is
slowly cannibalizing themselves by "following" Apple with their new
chiclet keyboard in all of the "30" models (X230, T530, etc.).  The
"20" models are the last of the ones with the "classic" keyboard, and
I had to get one last one before they were gone forever!

The other aspect to the Lenovo's which makes them the no-brainer for
me is their *input* capability -- the Synaptics touch pad and
trackpoint are simply unmatched -- even by Apple, in terms of speed
and responsiveness.  The nubbin allows hands to be colocated with the
mouse, so that click-for-focus can be turned off!  (I leave it off
anyway even with a regular mouse).  I assume you found how to adjust
the sensitivity of the nubbin?!  It's WAY too slow in Ubuntu by
default.

Anyway, great choice.  So you didn't get the touch-screen X220?  :)


On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 2:04 AM, Göran Krampe <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi!

On 01/09/2013 06:05 PM, Chris Muller wrote:
> Hi Göran!  Aren't the Lenovo's fantastic?  So, I just bought my 4th
> ThinkPad last year (2012) the T520 -- because I noticed that Lenovo is
> slowly cannibalizing themselves by "following" Apple with their new
> chiclet keyboard in all of the "30" models (X230, T530, etc.).  The

Although I did read that those chiclets are considered one of the best -
even better than the Apple keyboards. Still I like my X220. :)

> "20" models are the last of the ones with the "classic" keyboard, and
> I had to get one last one before they were gone forever!

Right!

> The other aspect to the Lenovo's which makes them the no-brainer for
> me is their *input* capability -- the Synaptics touch pad and
> trackpoint are simply unmatched -- even by Apple, in terms of speed
> and responsiveness.  The nubbin allows hands to be colocated with the
> mouse, so that click-for-focus can be turned off!  (I leave it off
> anyway even with a regular mouse).  I assume you found how to adjust
> the sensitivity of the nubbin?!  It's WAY too slow in Ubuntu by
> default.

Yeah, I always turn sensitivity way up on mice etc. And at first I
"fumbled" on that nubbin but now I use it exclusively and don't touch
the touchpad - which might be considered the weak point of X220 - it is
a tad smallish.

> Anyway, great choice.  So you didn't get the touch-screen X220?  :)

Nah, not on a laptop. Not yet anyhow, but I presume the industry is
pushing us in that direction. :)

regards, Göran

On 10-01-2013, at 1:25 AM, Göran Krampe <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Although I did read that those chiclets are considered one of the best - even better than the Apple keyboards. Still I like my X220. :)

I was rather surprised but I've found my oldish iMac chiclet kbd to be b far the best I've ever used. Now if it had a touchpad in about the same place as a laptop would I think it would be even nicer. Maybe a Leap 3D sensor would work ok though.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Thanks to all who gave advice! I am finally running Celeste on an HP
Pavilion G6 machine with an AMD A6 processor:

0 tinyBenchmarks '506930693 bytecodes/sec; 15495322 sends/sec'

I can hardly believe we are still at the 15M sends/sec range. Self did
way more than that on a 277MHz UltraSparc. But the more complex error
handling in Squeak might account for the difference.

Windows 8 is still giving me lots of problems. Just unzipping the
.sources.gz file so I could better debug my file primitive failures was
a complicated adventure. At least the latter turned out to be just that
Celeste was using absolute file names remembered from my Linux machine.
So "self openDB" sent to the MailDB instance got things working again. I
had been afraid that using a Win32 VM in a 64 bit OS could have been the
cause.

Bert:

thanks for the info on the current status of multitouch. I will have to
work on this, then. I am thinking about something like the LeapMotion
thing Tim mentioned or Microchip's GestIC technology. I was surprised to
hear that the XO-4 uses an infrared touch system. That kind of thing
stopped making sense in the mid 1990s.

Chris:

I had actually been looking mostly at Lenovo machines, but at a much
lower price range. The machine you suggested is, indeed, particularly
nice. The computer I actually got cost me $380  (before taxes).

Casey:

the Air is close to ideal but a bit more expensive than what I was
thinking and is more complicated to interface to. In fact, many of my
options didn't have a built-in VGA connector, which is still an
interesting feature for now.

Germán:

in theory the OS isn't important if I am going to run Squeak full screen
all day, but if I can't get over all these silly problems with Windows 8
by the time I get back to Brazil, then this will be a Linux machine even
if I lose a few features due to a lack of drivers.

-- Jecel

Hi Jecel:

Sincerely,
Germán Arduino
about.me/garduino

On 01/14/2013 02:19 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> 0 tinyBenchmarks '506930693 bytecodes/sec; 15495322 sends/sec'
> I can hardly believe we are still at the 15M sends/sec range.

Is that with Cog or the Squeak VM?

With the Squeak VM I reliably get around that figure on a range of
modern machines. With Cog I reliably get 60M-80M sends/sec.

Regards,
   Tony

On 14 January 2013 16:05, Tony Garnock-Jones <[hidden email]> wrote:
Ditto: this machine just clocked just about 14M sends/sec on an
Interpreter, but 84M sends/sec on a Cog.

frank

> Regards,
>   Tony
>

Le 14/01/2013 17:33, Frank Shearar a écrit :
On mine, an Asus laptop with Core i7 from last year:

VM  '676354029 bytecodes/sec; 17509420 sends/sec'
Cog '851205320 bytecodes/sec; 129291414 sends/sec'

Stef