Is it possible to run/develop for Panda3D on a netbook? Specifically, the Acer Aspire One?
It should. I can’t remember what gpu it has, if at all, so it may run using software render. Performance wont be great, but it is possible.
works perfectly fine. you wont get crysis-like grafics since your gpu is lacking hardware T&L. you can do quite a lot with it. you might need to keep en eye on the vertex-count but aside from that there should be no problems.
I have an Acer Aspire One and it runs great 
No way you’ll get amazing water shaders, but for general 3d programming it is my main platform 
I have an HP mini 311 (single core Atom cpu, ION gpu, 2G ram). Not as snappy as my desktop and load times are noticeably longer, but it runs the demos just fine. Once time allows me to get back to it, I will be doing all my testing on it treating it as minimum spec. If nothing else it should force me to be more efficient.
If I can get Age of Conan playing on it at an acceptable fps (which it does), anything I do on it should be able to be made to work. The ION gpu (nVidia 9400m), really is nice for what it is.
It’s currently living life as a HTPC until I get a dedicated HTPC, but I’d be happy to do a performance test if anyone has anything specific in mind.
edit: I’ve seen videos of crysis, call of duty, etc. on ION based netbooks. You might be surprised what these little ION powered netbooks can do.
ION chipset is manymany times more powerful than intel’s GMA. different levels.
Right - the question was about netbooks in general, then the Acer Aspire One specifically. I took the question to mean the OP did not yet have an Aspire one and may be considering it. My point is that if you are getting a netbook for Panda3d, or any 3d stuff, it’s worth looking into an ION powered netbook for the huge performance boost.
The new Acer Aspire One 532g, supposed to start shipping by end of this quarter, is ION powered. Actually, it’s ION 2 powered. The OP didn’t mention a specific model, and with an ION powered Aspire One on the way, it seemed appropriate to mention ION netbooks.
I use Intel GMA 950 so there is no problem related to it. I am using ubuntu 9 operating system. It work very well. I am not having any type of problem related to it.
Works also on older one - GMA 900 but ofcourse you can’t enable fulscreen filters.
I have that first netbook EeePC 701 - sometimes I’m using it for Panda programming, it’s very handy 
Runs fine on my Acer Aspire Revo. Atom 330 processor, NVIDIA ION gpu, 2G ram.
I am currently working on a game that is getting more and more sophisticated and thus taking more power to run. I do some of my work on my Asus EEE 1000H which is powered by an Intel GMA950(same exact specs as the Acer Aspire One).
I haven’t had any real issues with it not being able to handle the graphics. Though my game runs at a barely playable speed, about 10-20FPS. I believe this is because of my code rather then the graphics though. It has to do a lot of stuff every ‘tick.’ At some point I will go through and do some optimization.
Another thing is the complexity of the collision surfaces. Collisions surfaces that barely hindered the speed on my desktop killed my little EEE PC. As I’m sure most of you already know and do, you got to make sure you use lower polygon collision surfaces.
I should also note that I use quite a bit of particle effects in my game, and as I understand it, the particle system isn’t all that optimized yet.
Finally, it does help a lot to put the machine in ‘Super Performance’ mode, a processor scaling feature that the EEE’s have, I don’t know if the Acer’s have anything like that.
That’s my experience with developing on a netbook. It’s doable for sure!