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@xxxxxxxxxx > I agree, GNOME is too heavy for the XO, no matter how much you pare it down. I think we need to make sure we aren't headed for disaster, where people's XO's are bricked after a few months because their SD cards reach the write limit (due to heavy swapping), and go belly-up. Even if the SD card can last long enough with swap and GNOME, I think it may *still* prove unusable. And if it turns out a swapfile on the SD isn't doable, GNOME is a non-starter. At least XFCE can run a bit better, possibly without swap, or at least swap less (which would help the SD card last longer). We're asking a lot of the XO to run a modern desktop and modern apps, we should be prepared to throw quite a bit of functionality out the window just to get it to run at all. Jeff Weiss -- fedora-test-list mailing list fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list
