On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 09:50, Danny Kodicek
da...@sunflowerlearning.com wrote:
Hi, Tomeu, thanks for your reply
1) Screen resolution
The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems
unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two
big problems, one
of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and
one of performance.
Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen
animations, some of
them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that
resolution. Does anyone
have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For
example, I've
been thinking about whether we could run the software at
half-res and then
use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen
That approach has been discussed and I think that someone got it to
work up to some point, I recommend you to search in the
devel@lists.laptop.org archives for the keyword scaling, zoom,
etc. I'm cc'ing that list in the hope that someone will reply.
Thanks for that, it's very helpful. I did some searching as you suggested
and it seems that this is a very commonly recognised issue, with lots of
discussion but no real solutions. It did seem that several people have been
calling for the XO to have a screen resolution switch option, which would
certainly be the simplest solution from our point of view. There was a
mention of a particular driver which apparently fixes the issue but hasn't
been included in any Sugar builds - anyone know anything about that?
There is no such thing as Sugar builds. Sugar is a set of software
components that people such as OLPC and Sugar on a Stick take and
distribute on top of a linux distribution. Questions specific to the
XO are better asked to the OLPC community.
On the same subject, we've also found that running in 16bit display mode is
a serious issue for any of our content that uses 3d. Is there any way to
cheat the display to think it's 32bit instead?
I think you can draw to either 16bit or 32bit surfaces, then the X
system will convert them to whatever it's using internally. But I have
no idea how you would do that in win32 and/or wine.
I recommend you to make an .xo that contains both wine and you binary,
when the activity is launched, wine would be called with your binary
as an argument. I think there was a good example running around some
time ago, which did just that with an excel viewer or similar.
That's kind of what I was aiming for, yes - if anyone could point me to that
example or any others that would be a big help.
Maybe this could help?
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-April/005128.html
Regards,
Tomeu
I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be
welcome, but if
you could talk to me like a small child that would be very
helpful :)
Sorry I cannot give you more precise instructions, I'm really short of
time these days. I would suggest you to google around, patiently ask
here and in other fora, and go step by step towards your goal,
learning on the way. That's what small children do, right? :p
Unfortunately I don't have quite as much time as the average small child to
build up my muscles - there's a chance we might be piloting the software in
a number of schools very soon and so I'm really trying to get up to speed
quickly! I'm a fast learner, but I find learning about Linux in general and
Sugar in particular to be like picking up sand - it's very hard to find info
that doesn't already assume a lot of prior knowledge.
But as I say, even little bits of help are very gratefully received! In
particular, just nods in the right direction make a big difference - your
tip above was very helpful indeed.
Thanks
Danny
--
«Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
Farning
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