[Sugar-devel] Soas on legacy PC's

[Caroline Meeks]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:15 PM, Art Hunkins <abhunkin at uncg.edu> wrote:

>  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.
>
> The Pentium III's included one running at 500MHz and two at 1GHz. The
> former limped along, barely useable (an IBM Aptiva). Boot times for the
> Aptiva = 4.5 to 5.5 minutes. Kids would get highly frustrated by the pokey
> Activity runs.
>
> Of the 1GHz machines (a Dell Inspiron and an HP), the Dell did somewhat
> better. Boot times = 3-4 minutes for the Dell, 4-5+ for the HP. Activity
> running was adequate, if a bit sluggish.
>
> I certainly understand Caroline's limiting her donations to Pentium IV's.
> They run SoaS satisfactorily - similar to the native XO. (Native XO is
> noticeably faster than SoaS on the XO.) I do think, however, "higher end"
> (i.e., 1GHz) Pentium III's would work "OK" with SoaS where necessary.
>

We do a Pentium III 800 MHz in the classroom. Scott added memory to it and
that seemed to help quite a bit.  I'm waiting to see if it turns out to work
ok or be the computer the kids fight not to get.

>
> One disappointment: two of the three Pentium III's did not have their
> on-board audio recognized by SoaS: they were silent (though their
> sound works fine in Windows). Only the Dell played - well, and without sonic
> stutter. This potential lack of audio would seem a real problem for SoaS. It's
> certainly a major issue for my music Activity.
>

Does that mean you got audio to work well on other systems?  Have you
been following the audio work? I've seen a lot of emails go by and
some of them seemed optimistic so I'm hoping things might be working
soon. So far I;ve not even been putting Tam Tam on the
sticks because audo has not been reliable at all.  Which I agree is a very
big disappointment.  The Tam Tam suite is wonderful!

Thanks for your help with this.  Anurag is going to try to compile a list,
probably in a google doc, of what hardware we have and what performance time
we are getting and then we'll also record is kids favor or avoid it.  Maybe
you can add to this list.  It would be good to be able to give deployments a
clear idea of what is good enough.

Cheers,
Caroline

>
> Art Hunkins
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Caroline Meeks <caroline at solutiongrove.com>
> *To:* Art Hunkins <abhunkin at uncg.edu>
> *Cc:* iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org> ; Sugar-dev Devel<sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>;
> community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org ; Walter Bender<walter.bender at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Sunday, September 13, 2009 6:10 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [Sugar-devel] Bill Bogstad's floppy disk boot (Soas)
>
>
>   some idea of what is going on.
>>
>> I've tested CD helper vs. floppy helper on Pentium III generation
>> computer. On these, floppies take *way* longer than CD's: 5 minutes
>> (minimum) to 1 (actually, more like 10:2). Even though boot times are
>> significant, the actual *Activity* executions are satisfactory (though
>> hardly "peppy"). Overall performance is similar to the XO-1.
>>
>
> Wow, thats very different then the results I've gotten. I found that it
> took a minute for the floppy to boot, then it starts the USB boot which
> takes the same amount of time as it does without the floppy. Thus we add
> about a minute.  I wonder what the difference is.
>
>
>>
>> Art Hunkins
>>
>>  ----- Original Message -----
>> *From:* Caroline Meeks <solutiongrove at gmail.com>
>> *To:* Art Hunkins <abhunkin at uncg.edu>
>> *Cc:* Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> ;
>> community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org ; iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org> ; Sugar-dev
>> Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
>> *Sent:* Sunday, September 13, 2009 10:48 AM
>> *Subject:* Re: [Sugar-devel] Bill Bogstad's floppy disk boot (Soas)
>>
>>  I tested this on the GPA computer lab computers. It takes about 1 more
>> minute (4.5 vs 3.5) to boot.  I think that it will take more then a minute
>> on average to give all the students CDs, have them open the CD drawer, turn
>> off the computer, turn it on again and collect all the CD at the end of
>> class so that the next class boots into Windows.  My plan is the floppies
>> can just live in the machines, not pushed in all the way.
>> The current version
>> requires the user to press enter 1 minute into the process. Can we get a version that we just start the boot, then goto the rug for our lesson and 4.5 minutes later the machines are booted?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Art Hunkins <abhunkin at uncg.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> With regard to Bill Bogstad's floppy boot disk project for SoaS: it works
>>> flawlessly for me. (I've tried it successfully on both an older Windows
>>> laptop and desktop - vintages: Pentium II/III.)
>>>
>>> I've one suggestion for Bill: for use by children, I'd make everything as
>>> automatic as possible. Either delete the display where the user needs to
>>> make a choice (it's *way* technical and *I* didn't know what to do), or
>>> put
>>> a (10"?) auto-timer on it so that it goes on through (the usual way)
>>> without
>>> user intervention.
>>>
>>> For Windows people: I suggest creating the boot disk with RAWriteWin.
>>> It's
>>> simple, user-friendly and efficient.
>>>
>>> Great job, Bill.
>>>
>>> Art Hunkins
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Walter Bender" <walter.bender at gmail.com>
>>> To: <community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org>
>>> Cc: "iaep" <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; "Sugar-dev Devel"
>>> <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:55 AM
>>> Subject: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2009-09-11
>>>
>>>
>>> === Sugar Digest ===
>>>
>>> 7. Bill Bogstad has been working on a floppy boot disk for Sugar on a
>>> Stick. See http://people.sugarlabs.org/~bogstad/floppy/<http://people.sugarlabs.org/%7Ebogstad/floppy/>for more
>>> details.
>>>
>>> -walter
>>> --
>>> Walter Bender
>>> Sugar Labs
>>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Caroline Meeks
>> Solution Grove
>> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>>
>> 617-500-3488 - Office
>> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>


-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20090915/78df56fd/attachment.htm