[OLPC-AU] XO-AU OS 12 Feedback

[Peter Hewitt]

I know from experience that the hard thing about asking for feedback is 
that 99% of what you get will be negative stuff so can I start out by 
saying that "XO-AU OS 12" is a great achievement and I for one appreciate 
the many many hours of work that are entailed.

I'm not all that experienced with using the XO itself (I work mainly on 
(shhh!) a Windows XP box) so please disregard any of my feedback that is 
inappropriate.

I have compiled this list as I use the XO:

* the italic spiky font is a most unfortunate choice and is hard to read - 
I'm not persuaded by the argument that this font is used in schools - 
screen and page are usually different - eg sans-serif for the former and 
serif for the latter;

* When installing a new activity I would expect it to be immediately 
labelled a favourite;

* I have installed and tested all of my 37 activities although I should 
stress that none of them do anything sneaky :o)

* I was interested to see that the samba-client is pre-installed - I'd be 
interested to know the reason for this;

* occasionally when I right click on XO and choose "Shutdown", the black & 
white warnings screen shows and remains - I have to power down with the 
switch. Nothing external is plugged in when this happens. I've tried to 
narrow down the problem but, as you can see from the following, with little 
success:

- install 2 new activities from USB, test activities, unmount USB, shutdown 
- problem - could not reproduce
- start up, shutdown - ok
- start up, run Weigh activity, shutdown - ok
- start up, run Stars activity, shutdown - ok
- start up, journal, usb in, unmount usb, usb out, shutdown - ok
- start up, journal, usb in, install Stars, unmount usb, usb out, shutdown - ok

I wasn't going to mention this because I only observed it twice but I see 
the NZ team had a similar problem.

Peter