[Sugar-devel] Regarding the Sugar on Raspberry Pi project

[Simrann Arora]

Hi James,

Thanks a ton for the detailed response.

I will keep working on it and try to implement the fixes suggested by you.

Best Regards
Smrann Arora



On Sun, Apr 2, 2023 at 3:57 PM James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> G'day Simrann,
>
> I'll reply in context below, please scroll down.
>
> You wrote:
> > While performing the testing on Sugar platform, almost all the
> > activities 'failed to load' and were having erratic
> > behavior. However, when I restarted Sugar, some of them started
> > working fine, but after sometime again that erratic behavior showed
> > up.
>
> Yes, you may wish to investigate this.
>
> When the shell starts an activity, a timer is initiated.  If the
> activity has not started when the timer expires, the shell declares
> "failed to start".  An activity that is slow to start may yet appear
> after this message.
>
> Raspberry Pi can be very slow, depending on the performance
> (i.e. price) of the microSD or SD card being used.  You can measure
> performance using "sudo apt install pv" and "sudo pv /dev/mmcblk0 >
> /dev/null".  My test system, a Raspberry Pi Model B+ with an old 32GB
> SD card, shows 20 MiB/s.
>
> On first start, GStreamer populates a
> .cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.armv7l.bin file, Python must load all
> modules, and Calculate import of matplotlib iterates over the
> available styles.  All this takes time, and may cause the shell to
> timeout and report "failed to start".
>
> Graphics updates can also be very slow.  During activity launch a
> pulsing icon in the shell process competes with the starting of the
> activity.  Simultaneous processes making demands of the operating
> system and hardware cause mutual slowdown.  You can see this using
> top(1) over ssh(1).
>
> sugar:src/jarabe/view/launcher.py sets a default launcher interval of
> 100 milliseconds.  On particularly slow systems we have set this to
> 500 milliseconds using gsettings.  You might try that, and if it fixes
> the problem then you know it is the pulsing icon to blame.
>
> ```
> gsettings set org.sugarlabs.desktop launcher-interval 1000
> ```
>
> The pulsing icon should look much slower.  Perhaps Sugar should detect
> Raspberry Pi and set it lower by default.
>
> You can look through .sugar/default/logs for previous sessions, using
> stat(1) to compare file birth (activity start), modify (last output),
> and change (activity stop).  This may show you that some activities
> did actually start later, but were not visible because you had gone on
> to start something else.
>
> > Also, I did try installing other activities by using the following
> > command and had also listed the error in my testing report shared
> > earlier with you:
> >
> > sudo apt install sugar-{abacus,
> > [...]
>
> That command has been removed from my instructions.  It was out of
> date.  Therefore the error is of no concern.
>
> > As far as your second point is concerned, by Browse -> Activities
> > (the library) you mean that installing activities via the Sugar
> > Store ([1] https://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/) right? I
> > will try that as well going further.
>
> No, that's for Python 2 activities.  Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and
> Raspberry Pi OS no longer provide Python 2.
>
> For Python 3 activities the library is linked from Browse default page
> to https://v4.activities.sugarlabs.org
>
> The library is much smaller, because many activities have not been
> released since the library was opened.
>
> > I have also shared my GSoC proposal on mail and sugar-devel mailing
> > list, I would request your suggestions and valuable feedback for
> > improving the same.
>
> That's really up to your mentors.
>
> > Thanks a lot
> > Simrann Arora
>
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