[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 89

[Jim Simmons]

Art,

Being a frugal person I do all my home computing on legacy machines
like the ones you've tested with.  As far as SoaS is concerned, I
agree with your conclusions.  I got better results than you did with
my Pentium III because I've installed a USB 2.0 expansion card on it.
I haven't tried a Pentium II.

What I'd like to point out is that while these older machines don't
run SoaS very well they may be perfectly adequate running Fedora 11
with the included Sugar environment, especially if the Sugar
environment and its Activities are the only things running.  I do that
with a Pentium III with 256 Meg of RAM and probably much less than 1
gigahertz speed.  One advantage you have doing this is you can have a
swap partition on the hard drive.  Another advantage is that the
Fedora 11 distribution probably supports more sound cards than SoaS
ever could.  Plus you don't have to deal with slow USB 1.0 ports,
flaky thumb drives, etc.

This does not give the child all the advantages of SoaS, but it's
probably far from useless.  The nice thing about Pentium II computers
is that nobody much cares what you do with them.  Pentium IIIs are
getting there too.  Fedora 11 or better with Sugar could keep them out
of the landfills.

James Simmons


> Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:15:07 -0400
> From: "Art Hunkins" <abhunkin at uncg.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Soas on legacy PC's
> To: "Caroline Meeks" <caroline at solutiongrove.com>
> Cc: Sugar-dev Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>,
>        community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org, Walter Bender
>        <walter.bender at gmail.com>
> Message-ID: <80A5495BD20C4BFEA5410F19A5287FEB at Art>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> I've done considerable testing of SoaS Strawberry on legacy PC's: 1 Pentium II laptop, and 3 Pentium III desktops.
>
> First of all, Caroline was correct about CD and floppy boot assists; I was wrong. It takes *at most* a minute more to boot from a floppy. Occasionally, the floppy is even a bit faster. (I set timeout = 0 on my floppy assists.)
>
> All these systems have non-bootable USB ports, but do boot from either CD or floppy.
>
> My Pentium II (IBM ThinkPad, 233MHz) is a complete disaster either way. Anywhere from 8-9+ minutes to boot up. Won't make it through an Activity. More than 2 minutes to instigate an Activity from its icon. Bottom line: don't even consider Pentium II's.
>
> Art Hunkins