These days I do almost all my running with the most recent F11-based builds available (e.g., 2009/05/25 image and newer). It is only the lack of audio or video in F11-on-XO that keeps me from abandoning my 8.2.1 systems. Most of the items mentioned don't bother me:
[Note: My XOs all have a "permanent" SD card, which holds lots of executables (including activities) + gigs of data + swap partition.]
Forewarning: non scientific tests...
"occasional" creating devices hang
For me, it was "occasional" boot. Once it took 16 boots, the last 3 of which separated by two hours from the other 13.
My *average* number of repeats before boot is successful: 5 or so
- 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.
I do experience [particularly when using 'find /'] unwanted system stalls (OOM killer?) after the system has been running for a while. My guess would be that there are memory leaks - which would be a problem even if initially available amount of memory were greater. Here's hoping that eventually enough people will be using F11-on-XO to justify investigating such problems.
- 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.
- 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.]
- 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.
[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.>]
mikus
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