[OLPC-Philippines] XO-1 initial experience

[Carlos Nazareno]

The XO-1 looks very promising as a Flash development target platform.

Performance is pretty similar to my rig 5 years ago which was an AMD
K6-2 500MHz, 256MB RAM + Win98 with Flashdev.

We tried Gnash, but
1) The default installed Gnash has no sound (because Flash uses MP3s
for sound and the default shipped Gnash comes compiled with MP3
libraries because of FOSS licensing restrictions)
2) Gnash renders some AVM1 Actionscript 1.0/2.0 (Flash 8 & belpw) content wrong
3) Gnash does not emulate the AVM2 (Actionscript Virtual Machine 2)
found in Flash 9 and above, thus not making it a good platform for
Flash dev, especially FOSS flash dev -- the only *decent*
production-level tools for FOSS flash dev requires using Actionscript
3 and only outputs Flash 9 AVM2 content.

That being said, we installed the Adobe Flash plugin, and it ran
pretty good on the XO with OS Build 711.

And, when we installed Opera 9.52 (desktop version runs w/o a hitch on
the XO aside from needing to launch it from the terminal), it ran even
better -- Flash performance in Opera is much better than in the XO's
default Browser activity.

Anyway, this looks really good for Flash as a dev environment because
of Flash's small CPU & memory footprint (don't believe stories of
flash bloat -> those are due to abusive developers & content producers
who don't optimize. Flash can be really lean & mean!).

Regards,

-Naz