OS15 Random musings

[Kevin Gordon]

Folks:

1) On the XO 1.0, install space usage now leaves less than 120Mib of
workspace, even with the more limited set of activities.  Perhaps one might
be able to have a choosable 'fresh' install method that recognizes if there
is an SD card present, formats it too, and then installs swap, the
activities, and tmpfs over there?  The install would then install the
appropriate boot-up parameters to always use those features.  Maybe a new
OFW command, like fs-clobber  :-)

One can do it manually of course, (not me, but smarter people, because I'm
still learning), but this might have a broad appeal, if the install
continues to add features that are going to continue to grow the base.  With
prices on SD cards coming down to $10 for 4GiB, there may be a demand for a
small h/w upgrade that really extends the life of the machines into the more
modern distros.

2) su - now brings one to the bash prompt instead of the root prompt.  No
big deal, but when there, my custom install scripts resident on the USB
sticks give 'permission denied' errors when invoked from the terminal
prompt, and don't tab-complete.   Tried putting sudo in front, still no
luck.  I tried to add the exec property to the device, tried to chmod the
script, but neither seemed to have an effect.  Verified that they still
worked on that stick, usin 10.1.3.  Workaround:   added the word 'bash'
before the script name at the terminal prompt.  Worked fine.  Scripts called
from within the main script also executed, without having to add the 'bash'
to those lines within the first-called script.

3) There is no UI on the gnome side preferences to tweak the power-save
parameters.  However, the settings in sugar seem to be preserved when one
switches desktops.  Probably the same as before, but previously I think that
there was only one sugar-side setting choice, and it defaulted to have the
power-save off, so I never noticed.

4) There would appear to be some network settings that are preserved when
one switches back and forth from sugar to gnome, and some that are not -
there are especially some weird machinations with maintaining the 3G USB
dialling settings from side to side, and persisting after a cold boot.  I
will develop a more detailed test plan on this.  It might actually not even
be a regression at all, as I will also compare to 10.1.3, as that may have
behaved in the same way

5) Poor little Cheese has grown a dependent library.  This adds a few MiB to
the install, but it now plays better with the external monitors. and has
also added some better sizing controls.   I'll do more work on the USB2VGA
stuff, with or without Cheese, over the next while.

6) All 48 rpm's that yum update wanted to upgrade on OS14 are now current
with OS15; probably not in the least surprising to the os-builder folk, but
this was nice to see.  :-)

Cheers

KG
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