[racket] Racket & Netbook

I'm regularly using an HP mini-note. The nearly full size keyboard
makes a difference for me, as does the extra screen resolution, but it
is pricy for a netbook.

It can only drive an external display at 640x480, tho. The ubuntu
netbook remix does a nice job with the limited screen real estate, but
when you're running slideshow for a talk, you'll want to switch over
to something else because gracket doesn't seem to be telling the OS
the right things to get a full screen slide window (I recently
discovered it is possible to do this because the video player can do
it, but I didn't try to look into it to fix gracket, I'm sorry to
say.)

The battery is great. I've been using a 3 cell one (because it is
smaller) and it lasts plenty long for me on my commute every day.

The slowness of the processor is a real pain. I routinely run builds
from source, but I have to plan ahead for them. I see some slowness
like Neil describes, but picking the wrong font can have a big impact
on editing responsiveness. Generally, the crappier it looks, the
better the responsiveness....

Robby

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Neil Toronto <neil.toronto at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm running Racket on an Eee-PC 1000H with Ubuntu Netbook Remix and it's
> adequate. Performance is about what you'd expect for something about a third
> as fast as a desktop. The keys are comfy and the 1024x600 screen tends to
> hold enough Scheme/LaTeX code. Netbook Remix is good about maximizing space
> use, so that helps. (I also set my top panel to autohide.)
>
> It'll drive any VGA projector or monitor under 2048x2048, and the newer
> models probably do more and have digital output. It tends to take longer
> than 3x to compile Slideshow apps compared to my desktop, but it's snappy
> enough once that's done.
>
> The battery lasted about 4-5 hours at first. I've read that the newer ones
> last 6-7.
>
> Regarding Racket dev: Setup takes about an hour (I think), so I don't often
> install from source. (The binaries work fine.) The only problem I have is
> that inserting and cursoring around in DrRacket's editor gets really slow
> when the source file I'm editing goes above three screens of text or so.
> From my experiments, it seems to be related to both syntax highlighting and
> the number of on-screen glyphs.
>
> Neil
>
> Carl Eastlund wrote:
>>
>> I killed my laptop recently -- spilled a glass of milk right on the
>> keyboard -- and I need a cheap replacement for when I'm travelling.
>> This will not be my primary development machine.  The only absolute
>> need I have from it is to be able to run Slideshow presentations,
>> though being able to meaningfully develop in Racket (i.e. running
>> "raco setup" in a somewhat reasonable amount of time) would be a big
>> plus too.  I am thinking some kind of netbook, probably running Linux.
>>  Does anyone out there know what kind would be suitable?  I have not
>> looked at low-end portable computers in some time, so I don't know
>> what kind of performance to expect, what brands are reliable, etc.
>> Thanks for any pointers!
>>
>> Carl Eastlund
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