Test run of 2009/05/25 image

[Rui Miguel Silva Seabra]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 09:21:35AM -0400, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
>> * wasted memory
>>   GNOME just SHOULDN'T be there. A simpler window manager  will
>>   make it much better. I installed OpenBox but it was very hard
>>   because of OOM killer :)
>
> Looking only at what XO-1s I have powered up at this instant:
>   nand occupancy for 2009/05/28+:  516 MB
>   nand occupancy for build 801:    504 MB
> [Both values are affected by how many Activities installed in nand.]
>
> 256 MB of RAM is not much.  That's why I have an active swap partition.  
> I'm not sure how much a smaller "resident system"
> would help.

256 is actually a lot, however the XO-1 is less usable with Fedora
than the computers I used years back when having 64MB was at a premium :)

>> * OpenBox launches way too many GNOME daemons.
>>   I had to kill a lot of them by hand in order to get some more
>>   free memory.
>
> I normally run applications with Sugar instead of Gnome as the manager.  
> Haven't tried to overcommit with F11-on-XO builds, but in my experience 
> with F9-based builds, two "monster" applications active simultaneously 
> (e.g., Firefox + Adobe Reader) are as much as the XO-1 can handle.

Firefox is a DUD on small devices. Don't know about Fennec, but I liked
seeing Midori installed by default :)

>> * not enough memory for yum
>>   99% of the attempts to install anything resulted in OOM kills
>
> Helps to periodically do 'yum clean all'.  Yum normally runs fine.
> [Did cause a system stall once when trying to update glibc - but that was 
> on a 'yum upgrade' that was pulling in some 40 packages.]

Periodically? It was on the FIRST run of yum :)

>> * speed of GNOME interface was acceptable
>>   really, this was the biggest surprise I had...
>>
>> Conclusion:
>>
>>    fedora-olpc, to be a sucess, needs a much slimmer UI than that
>>    of GNOME.
>
> "Success" needs to be defined.  Seems to me the OLPC was envisioned  
> mainly for a single-application environment.  Except for being slow at 
> processing, I think it succeeds admirably.

I'm not talking about the sugar interface, which is what you're talking
about.

Non-sugar interface is something I'm also interested.

> [GNOME-on-XO has the advantage of clarity and not-very-complicated. Yes, 
> other UIs can be fashioned, but work would have to be put in to make them 
> "do enough to make it easy for users".  <See how much effort it has taken 
> to fashion Sugar.>]

GNOME on XO is a total DUD. It's responsive, but there's not much ram for
ANYTHING else. It's better to focus on a lightweigth window manager so you
can run a terminal emulator or two, a browser, something else. I've definitly
gotta try making personalized images.

Rui