Topic: blender and laptops?

[ratty redemption]

I'm trying to lean how to use blender 2.49.2 on my gf's dell inspiron 1545 laptop.

other then glsl mode apparently not being supported, I don't have use of a middle mouse button, as I'm using the touchpad with it's 2 buttons, so currently I'm unable to zoom or pan the 3d views.

do you guys have advise?

[kat]

USB mouse and possibly keyboard, that's what I do. I'm guessing the GLSL problem is down to on-board graphics, possibly an older Intel based integrated chip-set by the sounds of things as GLSL should run OK and any OpenGL capable machine - Blender's always run OK for me on my machines but I will always stuff them to the gills with RAM and make sure they have ATI/nVidia wherever possible.

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat, this laptop has 3gb running 32bit vista home premium sp2. the gfx chip is a mobile intel 4 series. the gfx driver version is 7.15.10.1576.

[silicone_milk]

I wonder when we're going to have portable external videocards for laptops kinda like an external harddrive 

I'd imagine bandwidth bottlenecks are an issue.

[ratty redemption]

@ milk, that could work and there wouldn't be the heat issues of an internal card.

[kat]

I wonder when we're going to have portable external videocards for laptops kinda like an external harddrive  
I'd imagine bandwidth bottlenecks are an issue.

Fujitsu did one last year, the AMILO Graphics Booster. I would have loved to have got my hands on one to test it as it seems to have gone down reasonably well with reviews, I can't seem to find it being sold in the UK or USA marketplace. A couple of reviews do mention however, that by default it didn't power the LCD screen of your laptop, you apparently need a newer set of ATI drivers to do that (no idea how that worked mind you - feeding signal back into the machine via USB or Firewire perhaps?).

[EDIT] a bit later.... Laptops need an XGP slot apparently (eXternal Graphics Port).

[silicone_milk]

sweet 

[ratty redemption]

@ kat, cool and interesting

regarding blender, is anyone here using it with a two mouse setup? I'm assuming there is a modifier key to turn one of the two buttons into the third but I can't find it.

[ratty redemption]

I've updated the dell version of the gfx driver and blender's glsl mode is now working

next is to try and get the input devices working as I still can't pan or zoom.

[Shaderman]

Nice ratty, almost there

Mouse_Button_Emulation

Google is your friend 

[ratty redemption]

@ shaderman, cool and thanks for the link

I should of tried googling but I'd only tried hunting around in blender's help menu but that didn't seem to list those.

edit: it seems there is a way to emulate both mmb and numpad, although the options to toggle them are in different pages of blender's preference window (possibly fixed in blender 2.5) so it looks like I'll be able to use blender on this laptop.

either later tonight or tomorrow I'll try some texture baking etc to see if that is all working.