[OLPC Engineering] [Techteam] New F14-arm build os21

[Anish Mangal]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 07:21, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-12-22 at 11:32 +1100, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
>> > That's exactly the feedback I was looking for, thanks. That's a UI bug
>> > in Sugar. I would strongly prefer the Sugar environment to behave more
>> > like Android, where any app/activity that is in the bg may get an
>> > instruction from the shell / OS to cleanup and exit.
>>
>> Good that we're on the same wavelength - I had a similar thought!
>>
>> The annoying thing about Android, however, is that for an app to
>> continue to work in the background it needs to be coded in that way. I
>> suppose that if we were to treat Sugar as an 'appliance' UI (which is
>> how I tend to think about it), this isn't such a bad idea.
>
> An additional problem is startup time. Python code tends to be a lot
> slower to load and initialize than compiled Java bytecode.
>
> Anyway, closing an activity automatically when memory is short would
> still be preferable to the current behavior of trashing the VM until the
> OOM kicks in.
>
>
>> A quick hack would be to limit the number of activities that can run
>> simultaneously.
>
> I agree. How about 4? Seems sufficient for most productive workloads.
>

It would exactly be that. A hack. How do we suppose to tell the
children you can't run more than 4 activities at once?

>> Our next OS will likely have the Dextrose resource monitor [1]. I
>> don't think we should be expecting children to be managing their
>> system resources, though. It should 'just work'.
>
> That was an attempt to make users more aware of the physical limits of
> the system rather than make the system itself smarter.
>

+1

> An unexpected consequence reported from Uruguay is that some children
> would open plenty of activities *intentionally* because "it's fun to see
> the laptop cry!" Well, I guess it means that the concepts of memory and
> CPU weren't too hard to grasp after all. Better not give them any pets,
> though.
>

Its interesting. Uy dropped it. Py loves it. One change that does need
to happen is replace the 'Cry [ :'( ]' icon with a 'Tired' one [ :'S ]
. I won't say anymore than this here, there have been LONG *excited*
discussions on the merit and design of this :-)

> --
> Bernie Innocenti
> Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team
>