[399] in Athena User Interface
Re: Fwd: Re: Beta, system, and usability testing, p.s.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Sep 8 08:47:44 2000
Message-Id: <200009081247.IAA01316@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: "Susan B. Jones" <sbjones@MIT.EDU>
cc: jlittell@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU, aui@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 08:47:37 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Hmm, forgive me if these have already been answered, but I don't think
anyone has replied...
> I think we should test on a Dell running Linux/Athena. It seems to be the
> most stable setup, I can find and is definitley the zippiest. I just tried
> it on Muhammed's Sun and it felt like mud. I tried to open Netscape and by
> the time it showed up, I had opened at least two instances. Do you want to
> have testers test for speed of use as well as ease of use at this point?
> Or do you want to wait for a later test?
Right now, the system is running out of the aui locker, but by the end
of IAP (I hope?) we'll actually be part of the Athena release itself,
which will impact performance in various ways. So, testing for speed
right now isn't necessarily a good idea.
We can artificially speed up the test machine by logging in ahead of
time and starting various programs, so that they'll be cached on local
disk.
> Actually for what platforms are the gnome people designing?
Well, there are pre-compiled versions at gnome.org for Solaris 2.7 and
Redhat 6.2, among other platforms. (Though from what I've seen, the
project does tend to be somewhat Linux-centric.) The only Athena
platform not represented would be IRIX. Making Gnome-Athena work on
IRIX has been significantly more work, for which I cannot take any
credit. 8)
> Here's another question. My understanding is that the AUI is ?
> particularly aimed for occasional cluster users. Are there plans to
> replace all or most of the cluster computers with Linux/Dells? Or
> will it be more or less the same mix as now. If that's the case, I
> foresee a problem.
All of the SGI machines are supposed to be out of the clusters by
2003. If I understand correctly, the proportion of Linux machines
will increase, but there will always be more than one platform.
If what you're getting at is the performance difference, I'm sure that
Sun hardware will continue to get faster as newer machines make their
way into the clusters, as well.
Hopefully we'll be able to fix the Solaris (and IRIX?) Gnome-Athena
release, at least, so that it's no more buggy than the Linux version.
::crosses fingers::
-B.
