[Sugar-devel] Happy / Sad laptop system load monitor

[Bernie Innocenti]

On 05/22/2014 03:39 PM, Sebastian Silva wrote:
> Hi,
> I remember Sugar as deployed in Dextrose 1 had a signature happy/sad
> laptop icon and both memory / cpu load indicators.
> 
> I am dogfooding Sugar again on a memory constrained laptop and am in
> need of a memory monitor, and this would be lovely.
> 
> Is that code alive? Maybe it was a good idea to have by default.

The "laptop avatar" feature was controversial: the main objection I
remember hearing was that the UI shouldn't be cluttered with low-level
information that users shouldn't be concerned about.

More interestingly, field testing in Uruguay revealed that users were
sometimes using the feature in an unintended way: they'd purposely open
as many activities as possible to "make the laptop cry"! Such cruelty... :-)

Anyway, the smarter fix for system overload is automatically limiting
the number of activities open at once, which recent versions of Sugar do.

If you're still interested, the original patch was pretty simple and
might still apply cleanly to the current Sugar:


http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/patches/0.88/sugar/cpu-and-memory-resource-indicator.patch

http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/patches/0.88/sugar-artwork/cpu-and-memory-indicator-icons.patch

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