Hi,
is xfce the right choice? i know it's "easy", but we should be sure it's correct. (i've been using it on my own xo, in a relatively unsophisticated way, but in the end that only makes it feel like an unsophisticated interface, so i may not be the best judge. :-)
I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here. Maybe we can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget, though..
- Chris.
Chris Ball wrote:
Hi,
is xfce the right choice? i know it's "easy", but we should be sure it's correct. (i've been using it on my own xo, in a relatively unsophisticated way, but in the end that only makes it feel like an unsophisticated interface, so i may not be the best judge. :-)
I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here. Maybe we can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget, though..
- Chris.
Well, in the early days of the "Fedora on XO" project, I was working with Jim on evaluating the possibility of reducing Fedora's image size heavily to make it e.g. fit on the NAND or a SD card. To give you an idea where we landed: The latest tries with XFCE resulted in an 300 MB image. Using GNOME didn't change a lot, but if I remember correctly, it was a few MBs bigger...
--Sebastian
is xfce the right choice? i know it's "easy", but we should be sure it's correct. (i've been using it on my own xo, in a relatively unsophisticated way, but in the end that only makes it feel like an unsophisticated interface, so i may not be the best judge. :-)
I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here. Maybe we can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget, though..
- Chris.
Well, in the early days of the "Fedora on XO" project, I was working with Jim on evaluating the possibility of reducing Fedora's image size heavily to make it e.g. fit on the NAND or a SD card. To give you an idea where we landed: The latest tries with XFCE resulted in an 300 MB image. Using GNOME didn't change a lot, but if I remember correctly, it was a few MBs bigger...
I don't think it would be too much bigger than the current joyride image (dependant on what apps you want to add) gnome is quite dependant on e-d-s but we already have the likes of xulrunner, abiword, totem etc for apps. The foot print to add their "standard" interfaces isn't massive. Then you need a windows manager, nautilus and gnome-panel. The question is then what deps they pull in and filing bugs to get them as slimmed down as possible. Some of the new deps will be pulled in anyway because Sugar wants to add support for things like printing.
Peter
is xfce the right choice? i know it's "easy", but we should be sure it's correct. (i've been using it on my own xo, in a relatively unsophisticated way, but in the end that only makes it feel like an unsophisticated interface, so i may not be the best judge. :-)
I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here. Maybe we can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget, though..
I think it should be more achievable once libgnome and friends are gone along with some splitting of some of the 'extra' features in some main packages out into sub packages. This ties quite nicely in with a NetBook "Fedora Mini" spin I've been looking at, which is how I got side tracked into OLPC :-)
Peter
Chris -
Thanks; I think your thoughts are rather similar to mine and I am trying to get information on what the actual user need (or perceived need) is. While there are obvious storage and RAM constraints involved, we need to be sure we're providing what most users will want (users of this desktop, of course).
Thanks to everyone else, too, who is contributing to this discussion, as it's very important to move this topic into the real world of "what is possible, what would it look like, and what compromises would we have to make?"
- Ed
On 12/4/08 10:08 PM, "Chris Ball" cjb@laptop.org wrote:
I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here. Maybe we can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget, though..
- Chris.
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 4:22 AM, Ed McNierney ed@laptop.org wrote:
Chris -
Thanks; I think your thoughts are rather similar to mine and I am trying to get information on what the actual user need (or perceived need) is.
This is a very important point from the adoption perspective. User adoption is largely driven by perception, as tied to their environment. This is the demand side of the equation. GNOME, XFCE, Fluxbox, etc are on the supply side and RAM disk space, processor etc. are our constraints. I'm going with the assumptions that 1) most G1G1 users already have a primary computer and 2) given that Windows has a large market share, G1G1'ers are Windows users.
The problem is to assess the needs of G1G1 users and *then* try to fit GNOME, XFCE etc. all within the constraints mentioned above. IMO starting with the supply side will be problematic.
Sameer
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Chris Ball -
Ed McNierney -
Peter Robinson -
Sameer Verma -
Sebastian Dziallas