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I have a recent Macbook Air 11 and two Thunderbolt Displays that I daisy chain. That lets me keep my telemetry terminals that monitor cluster health, chat and
by swdunlop 13y ago
I have a recent Macbook Air 11 and two Thunderbolt Displays that I daisy chain. That lets me keep my telemetry terminals that monitor cluster health, chat and music off to one side while I work on the other display in a full screen iTerm2 session.
I keep a bluetooth keyboard and a magic trackpad at the desk. Docking is just a careful sequence of power.. wait a second.. thunderbolt cable. (That pause seems to ward off occasional hiccups in OSX recognizing the daisy chain.) Undocking is the same -- savagely yank out the thunderbolt cable, don't sleep first; most of my crashes came from introducing thunderbolt devices while OSX was sleeping.
EDIT:
Regarding Virtualbox -- it works quite well with Linux and one of the displays, although you probably don't want to use a bulky compositing window manager at a Thunderbolt Display's resolution. I use i3 with boring old urxvt's, so the lack of compositing oomph from Virtualbox doesn't bother me.
- DinosaurArms 13y agoI have a new MacBook Air 11 as well, with only 1 Thunderbolt Display this is my perfect setup but there is one drawback, the fan is almost constantly running (not at full speed - unless YouTube etc is open). How do you find it runs with two displays?
- swdunlop 13y agoI have found that fan will run like crazy even with htop showing low CPU usage. It is something about Thunderbolt that seems to produce substantial waste heat, even when it's just a single terminal watching htop. Driving one or two displays doesn't have a perceptible difference for me; I wouldn't want to play a Steam game that way, but watching Hulu or Netflix on one screen while I code on the other doesn't impact Sublime Text's performance. :)