Re: Is there a VERY minimalist "Pure Blend"
Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
Quoting Richard Owlett (2014-11-26 14:44:44)
Paul Wise wrote:
On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 11:49 PM, Richard Owlett wrote:
My statement was more to effect that Gnome3 is an unacceptable user
experience. As I don't have good connectivity I'll have to wait
until Jessie becomes stable and I can purchase a complete DVD set to
try MATE. I may go with LXDE but haven't determined if I can tweak
it to do things "my way".
You can try jessie now, no need to wait a few months. Also no need to
purchase a full DVD set, the first DVD contains MATE. You can also
just apt-get install mate-desktop-environment over the Internet.
<snicker>
Would you *REALLY* care to download DVD(s) over a 56k dialup
connection? ??? ;/
Things I want are scattered over ALL DVDs of a set.
Just take as cast in reinforced concrete - NO downloading.
Minimal download undisputably is no download at all (i.e. sneakernet or
getting hold of data on some offline media like a DVD set).
Depending on your criteria, the better option, however, is to download
only the parts you need - by using our netinstall method:
https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
no NO *NO* ! !!! ;/
I already have all 8 DVDs of Squeeze and all 10 DVDs of Wheezy on
flash drives.
When Jessie+1 becomes stable, I will have *ALL* N DVDs on flash
drive.
Yepp, will likely skip Jessie.
So the better you clarify your criteria, the better we can help you. :-)
I find utilities to be such am personal choice that an installer
should NOT install a default selection.
Hmm, ok. I mostly saw Debian Pure Blends as ways to get the same
common setup as a group of people interested in a specific thing,
rather than a way to get a Debian system that is deeply personal and
different to everyone else. Jonas?
The gotcha is in defining "common setup as a group of people".
I find myself responsible for a few dozen machines with at least
3 quite diverse users.
1. My 3 personal machines
A. General browsing and email, generic typical personal
computing
B. Computationally intensive 'scientific' applications
1. preprocessing microphone signals for speech recognition
2. predicting arrival of storms by analyzing GPS signals
C. Support of other users
2. Supporting a friend who is typical of Microsoft and
Canonical market.
BUT he is annoyed by Microsoft's 'improvements' breaking
things.
3. My local church has multiple outreach programs
A. Enrichment for local elementary school children
B. Occupational training of neighborhood at-risk adults
To me the above sounds like not one but 3-5 different blends.
Take it as given that it will be a "single NonPureBlend".
If I do things right, much of what I do should be useful for Pure
Blends.
Whether or not those blends are pure blends depends on how important it
is for your use cases to have things "Just Working" as opposed to
officially supported by Debian. As an example, if your friend must have
Skype (a product existing only with non-Debian parts) then that blend
cannot be pure.
Whether or those blends are ultra unique to you or general enough to be
suitable to include in Debian similarly depends on flexibility of
requirements. As an example, if you really must have the Debian swirl
eradicated and replaced with your name or the name of your church, then
obviously that renders it unsuitable for anyone but yourself.
Lets use another example. My world requires left hand threaded
English standard nuts/bolts. The rest of the universe uses right
hand threaded Metric nuts/bolts. My parts would be of no use to
anyone else. But my design techniques may be of value.
That last example above has a real-world counterpart: the DebianParl
blend that I created in the Spring is currently deployed in a pilot
project at the European Parliament, where a political coalition -
Greens/EFA - and a community group - EPFSUG - both would like their
branding appear on the installed systems. So far I have turned those
requests down, by the logic that DebianParl is universal: Even if
currently deployed only in EU it should appeal equally well to e.g. the
Brazilian and Indian governments.
I didn't find it claiming to meet some definition of "minimal".
The supposed speed is a side effect of it using a minimal window
manager (fluxbox) instead of GNOME.
In a loosely related thread in another list, I've been pointed to a
script for creating one person's "minimal" install using debootstrap.
He had much different goals, but it's organized such that for each
goal I can substitute my goal. More careful examination may also
identify my error(s) in my first attempt.
Interesting. Please share URLs to such related activities.
In a private message I was pointed to
https://gist.github.com/rwcitek/df49bb1c3b2020170097#file-deboostrap-txt
Yes, there are many many interpretations of "minimal" - more minimal is
obviously to not use Xorg at all, only a console.
But my definition of "minimal" requires GUI DoneRite(tm;)
- Jonas
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