On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 09:21:35AM -0400, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
> * wasted memory
> GNOME just SHOULDN'T be there. A simpler window manager will
> make it much better. I installed OpenBox but it was very hard
> because of OOM killer :)
Looking only at what XO-1s I have powered up at this instant:
nand occupancy for 2009/05/28+: 516 MB
nand occupancy for build 801: 504 MB
[Both values are affected by how many Activities installed in nand.]
256 MB of RAM is not much. That's why I have an active swap partition.
I'm not sure how much a smaller "resident system"
would help.
256 is actually a lot, however the XO-1 is less usable with Fedora
than the computers I used years back when having 64MB was at a premium :)
> * OpenBox launches way too many GNOME daemons.
> I had to kill a lot of them by hand in order to get some more
> free memory.
I normally run applications with Sugar instead of Gnome as the manager.
Haven't tried to overcommit with F11-on-XO builds, but in my experience
with F9-based builds, two "monster" applications active simultaneously
(e.g., Firefox + Adobe Reader) are as much as the XO-1 can handle.
Firefox is a DUD on small devices. Don't know about Fennec, but I liked
seeing Midori installed by default :)
> * not enough memory for yum
> 99% of the attempts to install anything resulted in OOM kills
Helps to periodically do 'yum clean all'. Yum normally runs fine.
[Did cause a system stall once when trying to update glibc - but that was
on a 'yum upgrade' that was pulling in some 40 packages.]
Periodically? It was on the FIRST run of yum :)
> * speed of GNOME interface was acceptable
> really, this was the biggest surprise I had...
>
> Conclusion:
>
> fedora-olpc, to be a sucess, needs a much slimmer UI than that
> of GNOME.
"Success" needs to be defined. Seems to me the OLPC was envisioned
mainly for a single-application environment. Except for being slow at
processing, I think it succeeds admirably.
I'm not talking about the sugar interface, which is what you're talking
about.
Non-sugar interface is something I'm also interested.
[GNOME-on-XO has the advantage of clarity and not-very-complicated.
Yes,
other UIs can be fashioned, but work would have to be put in to make them
"do enough to make it easy for users". <See how much effort it has taken
to fashion Sugar.>]
GNOME on XO is a total DUD. It's responsive, but there's not much ram for
ANYTHING else. It's better to focus on a lightweigth window manager so you
can run a terminal emulator or two, a browser, something else. I've definitly
gotta try making personalized images.
Rui