Fwd: OLPC upgrades

[Tiago Marques]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tiago Marques <tiagomnm at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:46 AM
Subject: Re: OLPC upgrades
To: david at lang.hm




2009/2/3 <david at lang.hm>

> On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Tiago Marques wrote:
>
>  On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Bobby Powers <bobbypowers at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  2009/2/2 Tiago Marques <tiagomnm at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mitch Bradley <wmb at laptop.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>
>>> The current dual mode touchpad hardware is being discontinued and new
>>> machines are either currently, or will be in short order, being
>>> produced with a 'standard' capacitive touchpad.  IN FACT, the stylus
>>> mode had been implemented and enabled in the driver in previous builds
>>> (joyride, up to the beginning or middle of summer 08), but was
>>> disabled and removed from the driver because having the device in dual
>>> input mode made things worse for a large number of laptops.  The dual
>>> mode hardware is pretty flakey.
>>>
>>> I believe view source is implemented to some extent in Sugar 0.83 (the
>>> current development branch).
>>>
>>
>> Hmm.... ok. Is it possible/easy to use the whole touchpad as pointing
>> device, instead of just the middle. Since the middle has no "bump" that
>> could give some feeling of where it ends, enabling all would make it more
>> usable. At least I, frequently, need to look at it to understand if it's
>> going bonkers on me, or if I'm just trying to use it out of the it's
>> limit.
>> I don't see a practical use for all that wideness but it would just to be
>> less error prone.
>>
>
> only the center section is a touchpad, the sides are the stylus-only areas.
> the new systems are not going to have the 'wide pad', only the center
> section.
>
Ok. Guess I'll have to glue something in mine, so I have some sort of
feedback.


>
>  Have any experience with the kernel or suspend/resume issues?  I'm
>>> sure CJB would love some help here.
>>>
>>
>> Not really, I just hacked a driver once to add AGP and IDE DMA support for
>> a
>> VIA chipset, just added the hardware IDs.
>>
>
> as I understand it, the biggest problem right now is that the power savings
> stuff is all done in a Sugar specific way. I've used Sugar with full power
> savings enabled (backlight off) for light-duty tasks (e-book functions) and
> had it last an 8-hour day with half the battery remaining. I've also had it
> last 2-3 hours with power savings off and the backlight running

I have some problems with automatic power management, which I've reported in
tracker. Your measurements seem encouraging, I must say. Have toy with this
some more then.


>
>
> non-Sugar distros currently can't do any power management, so they are
> stuck with the short battery life. As this gets fixed and the power
> capabilities get standardized this should improve.
>
>  they should, and that leaves the XO in a competitively bad position. And
>>>> that's what you should also talk about, nowadays everyone knows they're
>>>> ripped off in their laptops, iPhone, PSP, whatever battery, that's part
>>>>
>>> of a
>>>
>>>> good image that the project can benefit from, if retail availability
>>>> ever
>>>> comes.
>>>> Python is killing the XO, what's being done in that regard? The $100
>>>>
>>> laptop
>>>
>>>> will always be hardware limited, how can python be a benefit and not a
>>>> *huge* burden? I for one can't get my head around that.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The idea is to give kids as much transparency into the software stack
>>> as possible, AND make it easy to hack on and easy to create new
>>> activities for.  Python is much more forgiving than C.  Its killing
>>> the XO?  A personal pygtk based project launches in a few seconds on
>>> my debXO install on an XO, but much much longer on 8.2.  It is a
>>> completely loaded statement to say that Python is killing the XO, and
>>> didn't really deserve a response :)
>>>
>>
>> That's my view on it, although I don't have any experience in Python
>> programming. Launch time doesn't really bother me, memory consumption on a
>> device with no swap and 256MB of RAM does. Is it just Sugar/Fedora/XO
>> distro
>> specific?
>> Please elaborate on what you mean by 8.2 taking much longer to launch.
>> That
>> would be something I would be interested in looking at, although I don't
>> think I have what it takes to "fix" Pyhton itself, if that's what's
>> needed.
>>
>
> the fact that KDE and GNOME (both desktops that are considered pigs on
> normal machines) make a XO laptop seem snappy by comparison to Sugar (as of
> December) means that there is a significant problem with Sugar. when people
> ask about how to fix things, the answers that keep coming back all appear to
> be python related. so it's not FUD to say that the dependance on Python is
> hurting performance.
>
> David Lang
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>
> Best regards,

                            Tiago Marques
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