On 03.01.2013, at 15:42, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:

> 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


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 -