GNOME woes on the XO / A modest proposal

[James Laska]

Greetings,

F10-Beta snap#1 is dramatically faster on my XO.  Still not quite a
speed demon.

Performance no doubt is the killer right now.  It keeps us from moving
on to deeper issues on the XO.  I'd like to pull together a lot of the
recommendations put forth so far into the wiki at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/TestPlans/XO_Performance.  Please
include any/all suggestions.

Before we make the decision to change the target Live image, or to build
a XO-specific live image, I'd like to gather all the pain points into
one place.  From there we can make a recommendation.

Thanks,
James

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 11:50 -0400, Steven Salevan wrote:
> 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

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