latest problems

[Erik Garrison]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 04:53:53AM -0400, elana langer wrote:
> Hey there-
> 
> I was at a school yesterday and it seemed like the three major
> problems they faced were:
> 
> 1) computer freezing constantly

Are the freezes 'hard'?  Does the whole system lock up?  Or can you
still move the mouse, or get to the virtual terminal by pressing
alt+ctrl+neighborhood button?

How many activities are typically running when a freeze occurs?

> 2) computers were missing their journal or the journal disappeared

We have heard a lot of reports of this from places which are running old
builds (656 for instance).  Perhaps upgrade is the best solution.

> 3) slowness

I've been working on activity switching and window manager performance
in the official 8.2 build (767).
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020404.html 
(This email describes a few high-level things we can do to change memory
management on the XO and improve graphical interface responsiveness.)


Again it's going to be hard to backport fixes to 656, and I recommend
investigating upgrade.  All of these issues have seen improvement in the
past six months of development.

One thing which is difficult is understanding which of these issues have
been fixed by our development process since the release of 656, and
which still need resolution.  To improve collaboration between us and
our deployments, it is necessary for the deployments to upgrade their
software.  If our customers are running recent software then they get
the benefit of software which includes fixes for already-identified
issues, and we get the benefit of users who have issues which are
reflective of the current state of our work.  It is a virtuous cycle.

Do the schools have a plan for upgrade?  Are there any significant
hurdles which stand between them and upgrade?


> I have asked for more details for each problem and will get back to you.
> 
> At another pilot school, school 4, one of the IT teachers has been
> running Ubutu on the XO and finds it much faster. He has recommended
> it to his teachers.

Do you know what ubuntu install image he's using?

Thanks,

Erik