On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 12:02 AM, Stefan Seyfried
Am 07.06.2012 22:12, schrieb Javier Llorente:
Some of the options we have:
1. Saying goodbye to Live CDs (and building USB live images). Others have already done that, such as PC-BSD http://www.pcbsd.org/en/get-it/90-isotope-downloads
2. Removing LibreOffice and GIMP from the Live CD and leaving just English (no German).
3. Making the Live CD KDE pure, like Fedora.
There is a fourth option:
4. creating an additional live media flavour besides oS-GNOME-Live and oS-KDE-Live.
This could serve as some kine of "minimal desktop live CD", with a second purpose as "comfortable rescue system". My proposal would be to put the following stuff on it:
* XFCE (my personal choice, but to be debated. We could even go for icewm, but the problem we have is that we need lots of "fat" stuff anyway: NetworkManager+applets, a Browser, maybe an Email Client, so using the relatively fat XFCE might not add too much of an overhead). * a browser (firefox) and maybe an email client (thunderbird?) * the chosen desktop should be "complete" and "functional" (i know, there are different meanings for different people). E.g. keep the multimedia stuff and the music player included, so that hardware compatibility can be tested (you don't need MP3 for testing the soundcard, ogg is just fine for that).
I've built LXDE appliances in SUSE Studio and much prefer it to XFCE. It pulls in the XFCE NetworkManager applet. It brings in Abiword and Gnumeric, a media player, paint and photo app abd two text editors. It also functions in VirtualBox Seamless mode - the LXDE menu appears on the host. The only issue I have with LXDE is that it looks like there's not much activity upstream - it's not getting the level of attention that Cinnamon and Razor-Qt are.
* rescue tools: all filesystem stuff, gparted, gpart, whatever. Maybe even some forensic stuff, Greg Freemeyer might know what is useful also for a "normal" user who has "just" killed his partition table and wants to recover it. * basic documentation, maybe the man-pages packages. Brian explained the reasoning for that quite good: "I happen to value documentation on live media specifically because half the time I'm even USING a live media is because I'm either installing or repairing or otherwise do not have normal use of the machine, which may mean no access to internet (at least via that machine)."
Stuff *I personally* would leave out: * libreoffice * gimp * languages
IIUC there is no real alternative to libreoffice for viewing office documents (some people realy write their tutorials in MSWord...) but then there's not much we can do about that. A picture viewer is probably helpful, but then XFCE's ristretto should do fine. Editing of images is probably not needed.
Note that I'd really "design" this CD with dual-purpose: useful as a "purist", "minimalist" desktop for "small is beautiful" geeks and for basic hardware compatibility tests but also useful as a rescue system for recovering after you installed grub into the wrong partition. And I'd actually try to go for less than CD size. We don't need to fill 700MB, a smaller download is always nice.
I never cared for or even thought about the building of the live cds. What do i need to do to start such a project? Can I test this in my home in OBS? Or do I need to use SUSE Studio for that?
SUSE Studio by default builds minimalist appliances - the "--recommends" option is turned off and you get only the packages you request and their dependencies. Even a KDE desktop will be smaller than the one shipped in 12.1. I've been using it for two years and I can't function without it. ;-) Once you get a build you like, you can export the Kiwi project definition and do your own testing / manufacturing / deployment.
Anyone interested in doing/using something like that? It's surely not useful enough for me to do it if I am the only user :-)
Best regards,
seife -- Stefan Seyfried
"Dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body!" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
I think for the official distribution, we need to look at the competition. What do they feature? What else do they offer? IMHO Ubuntu is the simplest - they feature a desktop LiveCD, a server CD and a cloud CD and just about everybody goes for the desktop. Fedora features a GNOME LiveCD, a KDE LiveCD, an XFCE LiveCD and an LXDE LiveCD. My recollection is that the Ubuntu desktop ditched GIMP this time around but still has LibreOffice. Fedora has both and I think openSUSE needs to have both as well. This late in the 12.2 game, I'd recommend sticking with the traditional media - full install DVD, GNOME and KDE LiveCD at 700 MB and a net install CD. In fact, I'd kill the XFCE and LXDE projects and abandon Razor-Qt and Cinnamon to focus on meeting the deadlines. I'm sure there are ways to manage the packages to get a GNOME and KDE desktop with at least LibreOffice word processing, spreadsheet and presentations. You might not have GIMP and you might have to make separate English and German versions, but I think if Ubuntu and Fedora both have LibreOffice, openSUSE needs to as well. But further down the road, I think the project needs to take a hard look at strategic realities. UEFI, the transition away from optical drives, Windows 8 and touch screens, tablets, ARM, .etc. openSUSE seems stuck in fourth place in the Distrowatch rankings and fourth place isn't a sustainable strategic position. Both Ubuntu and Fedora are making OpenStack Essex accessible in the main distro and supporting it via community documentation, but openSUSE relies on a third party. And Fedora's KVM desktop hosting tools are a good bit easier to use than what's built in to YaST2. -- Twitter: http://twitter.com/znmeb Computational Journalism Server http://j.mp/compjournoserver Data is the new coal - abundant, dirty and difficult to mine. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org