[OLPC-Philippines] Alternative OSs/Window mangers/software packages on the XO

[Jerome Gotangco]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Carlos Nazareno <object404 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:39 AM, Jerome Gotangco <jgotangco at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Same with Ubuntu and Gentoo. I think it's just not strong enough to do
>> CPU intensive work like flash. Even firefox is a hog.
>
> Can you try installing Opera? Even the folks at OLPC-dev say that
> Firefox runs horrible on the XO.

Well its not that horrible. It's usable but again, this is a slow
machine hardware-wise.

> Opera on the other hand runs pretty fine for me (waaay better than the
> default browse app), and I can open a number of tabs as long as the
> pages I visit don't have a crapload of Flash banner ads and AJAX
> scripts (New Slashdot, I'm looking at you!!!).
>
> I'm interested in how it compares with latest FF on XO performance CPU/Mem-wise.

I have Opera installed. Can't say much difference really. The thing
is, the slow feeling is only when starting the application. It then
crawls if you have a load of ajax/flash stuff on a site. That's why I
add flash and ad blockers.

> I'm very interested in the effects of running different OS/window
> manager combos on the XO to see how they affect performance and to see
> which package squeezes the most bang for buck for the XO given the
> XO's limited resources -- that and improving usability because the
> speed of launching/running apps on the XO has really affected its
> usability experience.

I don't think we can't do much on certain apps because they are known
memory/resource hogs but there will be a difference on the DE front,
like using something like xfce or openbox. It does make a lot of
sacrifices on UX. Again, apps are usable but don't expect a lot. Flash
animation will crawl but Flash interfaces will work fine. I created my
trip itinerary yesterday for hong kong and it had a flash interface
which worked well but a bit slower than usual but still usable.

What I failed to mention here is the battery life of the XO when
booting an OS from the card. It seems to have hit me quite big as the
rate of battery drain is way way faster even if I set it to aggressive
power management. Also since we're running from SD, we're using more
power than necessary to operate rather than running from the nand.


-- 
Jerome G.

Blog: http://gotangco.blogspot.com