Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Chris Ball]

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   <cjb(a)laptop.org&gt;

Fedora 10 on XO

[Sebastian Dziallas]

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

Fedora 10 on XO

[Peter Robinson]

> >    > 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

Fedora 10 on XO

[Peter Robinson]

>    > 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

Fedora 10 on XO

[Ed McNierney]

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(a)laptop.org&gt; 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.

Fedora 10 on XO

[Sameer Verma]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 4:22 AM, Ed McNierney <ed(a)laptop.org&gt; 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
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/

>  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(a)laptop.org&gt; 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.
>
>
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