[etoys-dev] [RELEASE] Etoys 4.1.1

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 15.10.2010, at 01:01, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:

> On Friday 15 Oct 2010 11:39:15 am Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> The Linux VM did not change since 4.1. But maybe you can compile a better
>> one?
> 4.1 is affected too. The fix is to build the VM in a Gutsy virtual machine.
> 
> I can do that for the schools here if it becomes necessary. I posted my 
> findings because XOs have 256MB RAMs and they may be affected by the change too. 
> So will people using their Etoys-To-Go on borrowed machines or in XO virtual 
> machines.

Well hopefully the distro's own VM will work fine? We only need to worry about Etoys-To-Go.

> When we upgraded 256MB RAM systems to Kubuntu Hardy (linux kernel 2.6.24?), 
> teachers and students experienced intermittent slowdowns and freezes lasting 
> 5-6 seconds - extremely frustrating. It was traced to memory pressure. The 
> working set shot up from around 130-150MB to over 200MB in Hardy. Kernel did 
> not behave gracefully under such conditions. Google count for "ubuntu hardy 
> slow" is over 48 million! XO may escape the curse if the defect turns out to 
> be in scsi disk i/o modules.

Do you mean slow-downs in Etoys or in general?

> Luckily for us, Dell Foundation donated 1GB notebooks to the schools. So we 
> consolidated two 256MB machines to a single 512MB machine in some of the 
> schools.
> 
> Should we take this discussion to vm-dev?
> 
> Subbu

Sure.

- Bert -