GNOME woes on the XO / A modest proposal

[Josh Bressers]

----- "Joshua Daniel Franklin" <jdf.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd love to see multiple "spins" for anyone with the time to try them
> out.
> This would include xfce, headless, beowulf cluster, etc. :)
> 
> However, I think in the testing period we should stick to our goal of
> running the stock Fedora 10 LiveCD on the XO.  Keep in mind that
> if that's not possible, then running Fedora 10 LiveCD on *any* older
> hardware similar to the XO is also not possible. That sounds like a
> bug to me. Maybe we need to check bogomips in firstboot and cut
> down on services and switch to some sort of "lightweight GNOME"
> or xfce. I would argue for GNOME first since there are a lot of
> guides and screenshots for newbies that assume certain things
> about the menus.
> 

As far as I know, this is the plan, but I admit, there is a rather serious
leadership vacuum for this testing effort.  What is the plan to make the current
images usable?  They obviously are not acceptable in their current state and I
presume we won't be giving the G1G1 participants a lengthy and error prone set of
directions.

Perhaps it would be worth creating an "tiny" spin or something similar for these
little netbooks.

You can get Gnome to run, without swap, as long as you follow my previous
directions to disable most services and disable most of the things that Gnome runs
(like the packagekit daemon, which is a real killer when it tries to update things).

I'd also suggest you install the Midori web browser.  It uses considerably less RAM
than Firefox.  It's not as robust, but in this instance, I think saving RAM is more
important than features.

-- 
    JB