bluefoxicy
Group: Members
Posts: 1
Joined: April 2005 |
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Posted: April 30 2005,02:58 |
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How about moving DSL to all GTK+2?
With the move could come an XFCE-4 or IceWM base. XFCE4 seems to take up about 50 megs, and barely bringing its own file manager; compressed (debs) it starts out at 12.5M. 14.3 with the artwork. 700k more compressed deb packages with appropriate plug-ins. The artwork for XFCE (xfce-artwork) can probably be dropped; so compressed the base is about 13.2M for the XFCE environment, which includes a file manager.
IceWM brings with it just a desktop environment that looks like Windows by default, in 4M (888k compressed as debs). This is at least a better way to ease-in new users, especially those who would look at DSL and go "WTF?!" For its size, DSL is great as a demo, and perhaps should be mindful of that. XFCE can also be configured to have a "start menu" and task bar, however. 
XFCE may be better simply because it brings a decent file manager with it. I don't know of any nice ones aside from Nautilus and Konqueror, with XFFM holding its ground pretty well.
To base on XFCE4, DSL could look like the following:
GDE: xfce-4 (13.2M)
Terminal, File Manager, Window Manager, Desktop
File manager: xffm (with xfce-4)
Terminal: xfterm (with xfce-4)
Browser: firefox (8.8M)
E-Mail: thunderbird (10.9M)
RSS: thunderbird (above)
Media playing: beep-media-player (1.0M)
Graphics: gimp (4.8M)
PDF: xpdf (1.8M)
Word Processor: abiword (4.2M with plug-ins)
Spreadsheet: gnumeric (4.0M)
IM: gaim (1.5M with encryption, extprefs, and guifications)
FTP: gftp (0.4M)
That all totals 50.4M. Dumping e-mail (thunderbird) and sticking with Liferea for RSS gives 1.1M instead of 10.9, leaving the total at 40.8. Just staying with Firefox (which can do RSS limitedly) gives 39.7M.
The condensed view is:
GDE: xfce-4 (13.2M)
Terminal, File Manager, Window Manager, Desktop
File manager: xffm (with xfce-4)
Terminal: xfterm (with xfce-4)
Browser: firefox (8.8M)
Media playing: beep-media-player (1.0M)
Graphics: gimp (4.8M)
PDF: xpdf (1.8M)
Word Processor: abiword (4.2M with plug-ins)
Spreadsheet: gnumeric (4.0M)
IM: gaim (1.5M with encryption, extprefs, and guifications)
FTP: gftp (0.4M)
This of course leaves no video player or DVD player or CD burner. It also leaves only about 10 megs for the underlying system. A custom-built system may be needed with gcc's -Os to shrink things down, and PNG images should be post-passed with optipng to try to gain a few compressed kilobytes. Still, I think it's a nice idea, as the result would look much more prettified.
The other route is much more laxed: aim at the 180M mini CDs. This isn't really the best route, because then they wouldn't burn to business cards. I like things I can carry in my wallet.
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