[wellylug] Lightweight Linux install

Fri Aug 16 09:23:14 NZST 2002

Hello WellyLUG'ers

Below is a desciption of the lightweight linux install which has been created by Johnathon Sim of the NZOSS.

I will arrange for a copy so that we can install it onto a machine down here to do a bit of QA on it.

Regards, Rob.

- - - 

Heres some info on a lite linux desktop configuration, which I actually 
use on a P75 laptop with 40Mb of RAM and an 800Mb hard disk.

It contains ~600Mb of installed applications, a 100Mb swap partition 
(this could be smaller) and the rest is for user data.  The system 
consists of a small installation of Redhat 7.3, along with a few extra 
packages not included with Redhat, and a few scripts I wrote myself. 
(All of these things are available as RPMs, and will soon be available 
as a custom installation CD)

Applications
------------------
The included applications are:
Desktops: WindowMaker/IceWm with the Rox file manager (and a set of 
preconfigured defaults to support such a setup).  There is also a menu 
handling system I wrote ("metamenus") that merges the Gnome and KDE 
menus to form menus for these desktops (By processing the menus through 
this script its also easy to create things like "task oriented menus", 
and file associations, so my script more or less does that too)
Here are some screenshots:
http://www.darkweb-rebel.com/Documents/Linux/light-desktop/index.html

Here are the usable apps (this is the actual menu structure)
Applications:
	AbiWord (Word Processor)
	Gnumeric (Spreadsheet)
	Dia (diagramming package)
	Ical (Calender/Appointment app)
	NEdit (text editor)
Do Something >>        (My new task based menus)
	Browse the web
	Create a document
	Create a spreadsheet
	Create a text document
	Edit Drawings
	Edit Pictures
	Send or recieve eMail
	View PDF or PostScript documents
Graphics:
	The GIMP (high-end image editing)
	GQView (fast image viewer)
	GNOME Ghostview (PDF/Postscript viewer)
Internet:
	Galeon (Light web Browser, based on Mozilla)
	Mozilla (needed for galeon.  A little too slow to actually use)
	Sylpheed (eMail client)
System:
	About Myself
	Authentication Configuration
	Change Password
	Desktop Switching Tool
	Disk Management
	GDM Configurator
	Locale Chooser
	Service Configuration
	Synaptic
	User Manager
Utilities
	File Roller (Archiver)

Also included in this install are a few basic command line oriented 
tools: mc (easy to use file manager/text editor), ssh, etc

All of these applications, with the exception of Galeon, run perfectly 
well on this system.  Galeon takes a while to load, although it works 
well once it is loaded.  I am working to replace Galeon with Skipstone, 
an even "lighter" web browser, also based off Mozilla, but which 
doesn't use Gnome libraries like Galeon does.

Notable omissions (I am also working to provide these, I just haven't 
had the time yet):

An instant messaging client.  Gaim (which ships with RH7.3) has too many
dependencies, so I am hoping that I can compile "Everybuddy" without 
such dependencies.  Everybuddy supports all widely used IM protocols.

A GUI modem dialer.  Redhat's standard tools for this job have too many 
dependencies (they require GNOME?) and IMHO are too complicated.  This 
system already has WVDial, so I will simply install one of the wvdial 
frontends (eg SuSe's "wvdial.tcl", or Redhats old "rp3")

Other apps ( eg GnuCash ), Games, Educational applications.  Many of 
these will run fine - the only limitation is available disk space

Anything else?

Application Installation
---------------------------------
This system includes the RPM port of debian's apt-get.  This allows 
software to be installed/upgraded over the internet without worrying 
about things like dependencies etc.  It also includes "synaptic", a gui 
front end to apt.  The only problem with such an approach is that a 
Linux system typically contains hundreds or thousands of packages (the 
system discussed here contains 304) that are mainly libraries and 
dependencies.  So the list of packages is too confusing.

I am working on a web based "metapackage" system based on apt, where the
user would browse a web repository of available usable applications 
(which would hide all the libraries and other dependencies), and allow 
users to install applications (and all required dependencies) by 
clicking a link that says "install" (this link points to an XML file 
that describes the package - this is parsed and the information passed 
to apt-get which does the actual downloading/installation).  This 
system is largely identical to Lindow's "click-n-run warehouse".  This 
will hopefully mean that users with no knowledge of linux will still be 
able to install/upgrade software on their systems.

This system is quite usable on the client end (it even includes a GTK 
based gui for browsing the list of packages).  On the "server" end, the 
tools for generating the web based repository from a list of packages 
are still incomplete (a working prototype exists, and the technology is 
all there, its just the dirty mechanics of building a decent set of web 
pages that remains)

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