GNOME woes on the XO / A modest proposal

[Steven Salevan]

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