[sugar] Sugar USB testing

[pgf at laptop.org]

marco pesenti gritti wrote:
 > On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
 > > CCing the Sugar list.

and adding devel.

 > >
 > > It seems that one of the problems we will be encountering with generic
 > > spins is footprint. Even a standard Ubuntu without Sugar was seeming
 > > too fat to load from a LiveCD on a Pentium 4 with 256K of DRAM.
 > 
 > I'm planning to dogfood the Fedora LiveUSB and I'll have a look to
 > memory usage while doing so. In principle, unless there are relevant
 > memory costs given by running on a LiveUSB, I'd expect it to work
 > decently.

i've been curious for a while -- can we have a show of hands for
how many people dogfood the existing XO s/w?

for my part, i don't, to the extent that i yum-install xfce and
run that.  so there's little memory pressure, and i don't run
activities, nor networkmanager.  but i'm still running the kernel
and most of the system software.  i can quickly switch to running
sugar, and i do, when i discover something that i think needs
investigating on a more "real" installation.  i think even my
limited "dogfooding" has been useful -- the bugs i've found or
helped diagnose have tended to be power management issues, and
some yum package management issues.

i _really_ think we need to make the XO base _and_ sugar be a
place that developers are comfortable living in.  our needs
aren't quite the same as a school kid's, but i think there's a
much bigger overlap than we often think.  with the advent of the
fedora spin we're going to lose xo/sugar mindshare among our
g1g1 and development users [1], and i think we need to think
seriously about taking up that slack.  even if that means adding
some "poweruser"-centric features which a grade-schooler would
probably never use, it's worth considering, in return for the
increased focus, and yes, discomfort it may cause.

paul
[1] but i think we'll gain in overall project mindshare, so in net
i'm in favor of it.
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org