MrPopinjay's xwax Setup :)

[diezdiazgiant]

i used to have a laptop with linux ubuntu on it, i dont think there were any virtual machines but part of the installation offers an option for partitioning and setting up a dual boot. it was nice - linux for the internet, windows for ableton and serato.

[MrPopinjay]

You can run a OSX or Windows within a Virtual machine but you'd take a massive performance hit and introduce a shit load of latency, it's not idea for performance software.

There's also this incredibly piece of hoodoo voodoo called WINE (which stands for WINE is not an emulator). It's a 20 year old project that amazingly translates Windows system calls into Linux ones (or OSX ones if you're using the OSX version). It's an absolutely insanely impressive project IMO, they have to reverse engineer every single bug in the Windows sysem. I used to use it to play games and sometimes I actually got better performance with WINE than natively on Windows. Still, configuring it is always an incredibly painful experience which some times just doesn't work. There's some projects like playonlinux and crossover which give you a friendly front end for WINE which is awesome but it's still not perfect and I really wouldn't want to use WINE for anything like performance software where stability is the most important factor.

There's also a really new project that does the same for OSX applications but it's not anywhere near as mature and powerful.

Dual booting or using native alternatives is the way to do it, though I doubt you'd be happy with the native alternatives. The performance software is all pretty sparse and we have no alternative to rekordbox... Though I think someone should try and reverse engineer the Pioneer and Denon waveform data + cue point + loops + playlist systems so we can have one application that can format USB sticks for them both at the same time. That'd be awesome. It'd be even better if everyone adopted one open format but I doubt Pioneer and such would be up for that as it wouldn't really make any profit for the company.

[fullenglishpint]

Thanks for such a detailed reply!

[synthet1c]

If you like small laptops that don't steal the show I don't think you can look past this clevo laptop... It's a poultry 11 inches (the same form factor of a netbook) but has a real i7 third gen processor with upto 16 GB of 1833mhz RAM and a 2GB GDDR3 VRAM GT650 Video card, the best thing is it is fully customisable to suit whatever specs you need/want ... The thug is a bight sized little beast and definately worth a look if you are in the market for a new DJ laptop.. This is the Australian OEM version, but they are sold throughout the world from horize, sager, metabox etc...

http://www.metabox.com.au/W110ER-features.asp

[MrPopinjay]

Wow that's a powerful little machine! (ew glossy screen)
Personally if I was going to sink a load of money into a laptop I'd get a Thinkpad. I'm a bit of a fanboy. I really hope the x240 has a 1080p screen, it's shocking that laptops are still ~720p, especially when you think about the pixel density you get on phones and tablets.

Thanks for such a detailed reply!

Posting needlessly detailed replies on tech no one cares about is kinda my thing. :P

[fullenglishpint]

Posting needlessly detailed replies on tech no one cares about is kinda my thing. :P

And the community is grateful

[synthet1c]

the matte screen just costs $60 more , also 720p on an 11inch screen has a higher pixel density that a 20 inch 1080p and when you increase the pixel density you decrease the size of everything on screen or force the use of vectors for design, just another reason why apple suck as they threw a spanner into current web design principals /rant

[fullenglishpint]

Massively improved screen resolution isn't a bad thing just because it's inconvenient for web designers.

[synthet1c]

if all the other companies follow suit it means more data moving on the interweb, so that means the web slows down/ needs an upgrade of telecommunication networks and the current generation of loptops become worthless in the eyes of consumers... Next thing you know we will have to increase the wireless bandwidth increasing the radiation on earth causing a mass extinction of the human race... or so we thought until the dead begin to reanimate.. It will be bedlam on the streets and apple will be the sparrow that farted to start the whole chain of events...

Now if you excuse me I going to take my meds...

[fullenglishpint]

You must have been terrified when broadband arrived