[olpc-software] graceful handling of out-of-memory conditions

[Christopher Blizzard]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On top of that, it seems to be widely accepted that teenagers talking to 
> teenagers these days use IM instead of email virtually always, using 
> email only to talk to adults or web stores or what have you.
> 
> What this means is that a kids' laptop in the US could easily just punt 
> and say "get a hotmail/gmail/yahoo account"
> 
> I won't pretend to know how email fits in to One Laptop Per Child, but 
> if a "thick client" mail app is uninteresting to US teenagers, perhaps 
> there are creative ways to avoid needing one on the global laptop too.

I think the answer here is "something in the middle."  Being able to 
read mail offline is pretty important, but keeping things simple and 
easy to use is important.  Right now on Linux we have the two extremes: 
easy via webmail or crazy-stupid-complex mail clients.  Mail clients 
tend to adapt to everyone's environements.  (Kind of like cracking out 
gnome-terminal?)

One of the nice things we can do here is to be able to dictate some of 
the environment.  The carrot being that we can provide an easy to use 
interface with a clean method for configuration and the stick being that 
we don't really have any other options available.

As for chat, we need to move to something that supports both servers and 
peer-to-peer - at least from the interface standpoint.  People have 
brought up using jabber for the servers and there appears to be little 
consensus on the peer to peer aspects; I have inventing, but it's clear 
that we're going to have to do some of that, especially on the interface 
side.  Nearly everything I've seen that's out there has serious problems 
in the context of OLPC.

> 
> Possible questions, Where does the IMAP server live in the envisioned 
> One Laptop Per Child deployment? Could a webmail server live there 
> instead for example? To what extent will the kids be using some sort of 
> chat, vs. email, and who will the kids be chatting with or emailing?

The model that we've been talking about using is that there's a small 
server that sits in each school.  This server isn't really anything more 
than the laptop that you see with a disk enclosure added to the back to 
a USB port.  The idea is that the software and experience is as close to 
the same as the laptop itself.  That is, it's largely autonomous and 
self managing, patches are applied in exactly the same way, etc.  The 
only difference being some switches that are flipped that say "I'm a 
server" and then it starts acting like one.

--Chris