Fedora on XO: testing!

[Jim Gettys]

Cool....  Bravo to Jeremy!!!!

ALSO NOTE: please use the SanDisk Extreme III SD cards; some SD cards in
your drawer are probably trash, and I'd like us not to spend lots of
people's time debugging bad SD cards causing Linux to fail in strange
ways.  We don't have the time right now to chase such bugs at the OLPC
end.  M$ has done extensive testing of SD cards, and that's their
recommendation.  I may be able to send a few out to people feeling poor,
but the fastest way is for you to order them quickly yourselves.  They
cost a bit more than the trash, but they are very fast (good for
hackers ;-)).

There are some additional things we should test/understand....

Ram space is going to be an issue: the default spins don't think too
much about it, short of things like xfce, which are probably not going
to keep quite a few G1G1 folks happy.  Lots of such buyers are much more
"gnome-like" in their experience (to use a poor joke).

So where does are RAM go, and what can/should we do about it in some
(future) spin that might be more aimed at that market that might be more
approachable?

Sebastian and I have been working on a much smaller spin with a more
modest inventory that might someday be appropriate for installing into
the internal NAND of that characteristic with a small enough footprint
to fit and likely much lower typical RAM usage (some apps are known
pigs); but its contents is a guess rather than based on data, and
spending time on it right now won't get coverage of other items we and
others may need.

So I think we need to spend the next month or two strictly trying the
"stock" spins, to see what problems we really have. Then any small spin
can be made on something other than hand wave, and we'll know what to
expect in terms of people who do naive things.  Let's play stupid for a
while and see what breaks ;-).

The other place we'll need to think is font sizes, and what happens in
B/W mode: stock themes almost certainly become unusable in reflective
mode, which is sad if you are geek who wants to go to the beach...  I'm
not sure there is anything we can do about this in the short term, but
we should figure out what our best defaults are, which we can do
something about quickly.

As far as other testing, suspend/resume is a big one, on which the XO
should shine. We're faster than most anything else out there, and in
principle, it should "just work".  We tested our hardware up to 50,000
SR cycles.  I'd really like to nail this one item, even if much else
suffers, if we can.
                          - Jim



On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 06:52 -0400, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
> If you have an XO and want to get Fedora running on it, this is the time 
> to try it.  :)
> 
> Jeremy has an image working, and has laid down the gauntlet:
> http://katzj.livejournal.com/438184.html
> 
> We have a testable image here:
> http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/olpc/olpc-gnome.iso
> 
> And we have a tracking bug to file bugs against:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=FedoraOnXO
> 
> We also need a more formalized test plan.  Not super-formal, but a basic 
> set of tasks that should "just work".  Actually, I wonder: how much of the 
> typical testing for Fedora could simply be replicated for the XO?  I will 
> ask the Fedora test folks.
> 
> --g
> 
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-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child