To get started with SingleStore on your laptop, you can quickly provision a "cluster-in-a-box" cluster using a Linux virtual machine. This setup allows you to spin up a Small Store cluster, connect it to SingleStore Studio, and start being productive. You'll need at least 8GB RAM and four CPUs to run this minimal version of SingleStore on your laptop. The steps include getting a free SingleStore license, installing VirtualBox, starting a Linux VM, installing SingleStore's apt repository into Linux, installing the latest version of SingleStore Toolbox, SingleStore command-line client, and SingleStore Studio, starting the SingleStore cluster with memsql-deploy, disabling hardware capacity checks, launching SingleStore Studio, and creating a new cluster. With this setup, you can try out SingleStore capabilities, test SingleStore capabilities, prototypes, proof of concept (PoC), production workloads, high availability, and performance testing.