Hello,
yesterday on IRC Jeremy Huntwork expressed is concerns about the CD
size. Indeed, the 6.2-pre2 CD is 454 MB in size. The following will help
reducing the CD size:
1) Removal of all bitmap fonts and replacing of Arphic fonts with
FireFly: already done together with the X11R7 transition.
This results in a 439 MB CD. I expected better results, but we added
many new video drivers.
2) Removal of server components of SAMBA: already done, although they
proved to be useful for me personally when I used this CD for retrieving
data from a crashed Windows 2000 Server installation.
This results in a 425 MB CD.
3) Dropping DRI/OpenGL/xvideo support. I don't want to drop it now,
because if we do a pre-release the LiveCD soon, it would highlight the
problems that the BLFS book will see (via xlockmore/xscreensaver). I do
think that such binary-only releases generate more useful bug reports
because people who can easily circumvent their problem by silently
deviating from the book instructions no longer have this chance with
binary-only releases. Also, this currently serves as a X11R7 hint to
BLFS book developers.
Of course, this eye candy will be removed before the final release, and
this will subtract at least 11 MB from the CD size.
4) Dropping Composite, Damage and Fixes support: the Fixes extension is
used by default by GTK+ as installed on the CD. Composite could be used
by XFCE if we pass the --enable-compositor option to xfwm. Estimated
space savings are below 1 MB.
5) Dropping static libraries in /usr/lib, except for libc*.a: total 30
MB, that gives approximately 10 MB of the CD size.
6) Dropping support for Asian languages: huge font files, and the whole
family of SCIM packages. This is going to drop 80 MB off the CD size,
but I think we have some users there, and previous releases of the CD
included the (now obsolete) zhcon package. Anyway, libchewing and
scim-chewing packages are optional, and scim-input-pad is even less
needed (to use it, right click the keyboard icon in the upper right
corner. It allows easy input of strange characters like math operators,
currency symbols, dingbats and so on).
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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