overly agressive sleeping (and other requests/suggestions)

[david at lang.hm]

I've been trying to use the XO as my primary machine at home, but there 
are a few significant problems I've been running into.

First, power management.

in recent builds thr XO is very eager to go to sleep (although build 1633 
did change it to 60 seconds from 30)

unfortunantly with the slow wakeup (1-2 seonds) and the screen dimming 
when it goes to sleep, this can be very annoying when trying to do a lot 
of reading. the dimming is distracting, and the wakeup delay is just 
frustrating.

in addition, the only thing that keeps it awake is keyboard input (or a 
very busy cpu), I see this when it goes to sleep on me in spite of alpine 
checking for new mail every 15 seconds, others will see it at other times.

I would like to suggest a few changes

1. make screen and/or network activity keep the machine awake (for network 
activity you may want to exclude some housekeeping traffic)

2. don't dim the screen when going into the first level sleep

3. until the wakeup is spead up significantly, don't go to sleep as 
quickly. as the wake time improves the sleepyness can be increased, but 
the current state of things is lousy.

4. when plugged into external power, be even less sleepy.

I realize people are working on power management, and I understand that 
you can't know if the external power is from a power plant or from a hand 
crank, but you have no other way to tell the machine that it's not running 
on battery power, so you need to use it.

The  second major problem is performance. I realize this is only a 433 mhz 
cpu, but it's only been a year since I switched from using a 333 mhz 
laptop (with 192M ram) and it was significantly more useable. I ran 
slackware with windowmaker on that machine for years.

on the XO the startup time for applications is miserable. starting a 
terminal takes about 6 seconds, but running xterm takes less than one 
second. 5 seconds of computer time is an etermity.

the browser works, as long as you only have one thing you are interested 
in. I haven't been able to get your substatute for bookmarks to survive 
across sessions, and the journal has been useless as a history mechanism. 
the lack of both tabs and opening additional windows makes it almost 
impossible to follow a tangent without completely loosing where you 
started.

the journal is so cluttered that it's almost impossible to find things in 
it.

to address these issues I would suggest a few things

1. split the journal, today it's a log of activity and a file system. 
split these two functions. this will help the clutter and should also help 
the speed as there is less to setup when applications start.

2. allow things to open new windows, but make opening a new window start a 
new screen (avoiding overlapping windows)

3. allow tabs in the browser (use the right half of the toolbar) chasing 
tangents is very important in learning, but so is being able to recover 
and go down a different path.

I've been useing my XO daily for the last month, and I think the idea is 
great, but I've been getting frustrated by some of the software, and hit 
one too many network disconnects becouse of the agressive power savings, 
which promted meto finally vent these frustrtions

David Lang