How would you shrink Fedora? [LWN.net]

How would you shrink Fedora?

Posted Feb 24, 2005 14:04 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803)
Parent article: How would you shrink Fedora?

I would strongly encourage them to leave the Java stuff in, especially if it is compiled with gcj. Gcj is maturing and definitely adequate for a lot of applications. I am preparing to start a largish project, targetting gcj.

The more people are encouraged to use gcj, the sooner we will have a truly Free implementation of the Java language, and we will have 100% Free access to the Java applications out there.

And, having an included gcj-compiled Eclipse included would be very cool.

Other candidates for removal:

* Perhaps KOffice, for now. Does anyone really use it? Mind you, I think it's an important project, but the truth is, it's well behind even AbiWord/Gnumeric at this point.

* Internationalization takes an awful lot of space, and that alone could probably do it. I guess language-specific versions of Fedora are out of the question?

* Games, except leave kdegames and gnome-games

And something that really should be added:

* Scribus. I can't believe any distro that targets desktops would exclude that. I've used it for newsletters, and it rocks! Absolutely should be in everyone's desktop menu.

(Log in to post comments)

How would you shrink Fedora?

Posted Feb 24, 2005 18:04 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

it's well behind even AbiWord/Gnumeric

I think the "even" is a little unwarranted there, particularly wrt Gnumeric, which is by far the best open source spreadsheet available. Admittedly Abiword is a little behind OO.o, but it's orders of magnitude faster, and catching up fast in terms of features.

And something that really should be added: Scribus.

Agreed completely. That said, it's already there in Fedora Extras, but there does need to be some evangelism to encourage more places to mirror Extras. In the UK, you can get it from http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/

How would you shrink Fedora?

Posted Feb 24, 2005 20:29 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

> I think the "even" is a little unwarranted there, particularly wrt Gnumeric

Correct, sorry. I use Gnumeric myself, prefer it to OOo Calc.

Heck, they maybe should have taken out OOo and left Abiword/gnumeric. Although Abiword did crash nastily on me a couple months ago, leaving my file in malformed XML that I had to fix by hand!

Looks now like the DID remove Abiword/Gnumeric, which seems like a mistake to me. Oh well.

Regarding Extras, I've never even been able to get YUM to use them correctly. Always get an error...

How would you shrink Fedora?

Posted Feb 25, 2005 5:03 UTC (Fri) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

What error does yum give you on extras? I use them all the time with yum b/c I have to make sure these things work a little bit. :)

How would you shrink Fedora?

Posted Feb 25, 2005 15:40 UTC (Fri) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Setting up Repo: extras
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: extras
failure: repodata/repomd.xml from extras: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

And this is from a yum.conf that I took right out of ... uh, now I forget where! But it supposedly works for others.

How would you shrink Fedora?

Posted Feb 25, 2005 15:43 UTC (Fri) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

Post the repository section for the extras set you have. I bet it's not right.
or better yet - ask about this on fedora-extras-list.