GNOME woes on the XO / A modest proposal

[Jeff Weiss]

Steven Salevan wrote:
> Hey guys,
> At the moment, it appears that GNOME is borderline dysfunctional on my
> XO, despite applying the recommended speed fixes (creating a persistent
> overlay, turning off swappiness).  On runlevel 3, the box seems to be
> stable and at least usable, but if I switch over to runlevel 5, I cannot
> use the box for more than about 3 minutes without receiving a kernel
> panic that leads to a total system freeze.  Alas, this panic is not
> logged to any system log, but I'll be connecting up a serial console
> over the next day or two get it off of the system and into a new BZ.
> 
> Outside of the panic issue, how goes GNOME testing for everyone else on
> the list?  For the few minutes that the device actually works, the
> system seems to crawl along at glacial speeds, taking over a minute to
> bring up simple tools such as the Appearance preferences configurator. 
> Firefox takes more time to load than the box has before reaching the
> aforementioned system freeze.
> 
> So...  if my hunch is right, and I fear it is, I don't know if 2.5
> weeks' worth of testing is going to ensure that we ship a functional
> GNOME-laden version of F10.  From what I've read and heard, the plan is
> to maintain a sizeable swap space on the SD card, as the 256MB of
> built-in RAM alone is not sufficient to run GNOME, which will wear out
> the card in time along with limiting available space (especially if
> we're leaning on shipping the 2G card with each XO).
> 
> This might be a controversial viewpoint, and if so, so be it, but I
> wonder if we shouldn't change our focus to a more lightweight window
> manager such as XFCE.  There's already been work performed to this effect:
> 
> http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/fedora-xo;a=summary
> 
> GNOME may indeed be more familiar to users, but what use is familiarity
> if there's no functionality?  At least XFCE can run comfortably on the
> limited resources of the XO, allowing us to focus on the issues that we
> can indeed address in the limited time we have.  What do you guys think?
> -Steve Salevan
> ssalevan at redhat.com
> 


I agree, GNOME is too heavy for the XO, no matter how much you pare it
down.  I think we need to make sure we aren't headed for disaster, where
people's XO's are bricked after a few months because their SD cards
reach the write limit (due to heavy swapping), and go belly-up.

Even if the SD card can last long enough with swap and GNOME, I think it
may *still* prove unusable.  And if it turns out a swapfile on the SD
isn't doable, GNOME is a non-starter.

At least XFCE can run a bit better, possibly without swap, or at least
swap less (which would help the SD card last longer).

We're asking a lot of the XO to run a modern desktop and modern apps, we
should be prepared to throw quite a bit of functionality out the window
just to get it to run at all.

Jeff Weiss