LXDE Spin

Fedora Lite Spin

Summary

Fedora Lite Spin - Fedora for systems with limited resources

Owner

• Name: Christoph Wickert
• Added: Kam Salisbury
• (feel free to add yourself)

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 11
• Last updated: 2009-01-04
• Percentage of completion: 50%

Detailed Description

Fedora lite is meant to be a lightweight but yet complete desktop based on LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. For more information about LXDE please visit the LXDE wiki page .

Benefit to Fedora

Current Fedora installs need a lot of disk space and resources. This is an attempt to make Fedora suitable for older and smaller machines.

Scope

Some package reviews, livecd

Test Plan

1. get the kickstart file accepted by the spin SIG and add it to the SIGs/Spins/KickstartPool
2. Get the missing packages into Rawhide
3. Release alpha and beta releases in sync with Fedora 11 via torrent for testing
4. Run the spin through the QA team basic set of tests on i386 and x86_64 platforms
5. Work with Fedora QA to ensure that we have sufficient coverage

1. Spin should be released with F-11

User Experience

A modern but lightweight desktop including a panel, desktop icons and a file manager together with a collection of lightweight applications for every day needs.

Screenshots: http://lxde.org/image_galleries/screenshots

Package Selection Proposal

In addition to the packages already provided by LXDE here is a proposal for packages for the livecd.

Terminal Emulator	LXTerminal	X	roxterm, xterm	X
Web Browser	Midori	X	Kazehakase, Skipstone	X/-
Email Client	sylpheed	X	claws-mail	X
Instant Messaging	ayttm?
IRC	lostirc	X	xchat	X
Bittorrent	transmission	X	bittorrent-gui, linkage	X
Office	abiword, gnumeric	X	Siag Office
Calendar	dayplanner	X
Address Book	gfa	X
Document Viewer	E-PDF	X	gv	X
Audio Player	quodlibet, lxmusic	X/-	audacious, eina	X/-
Movie Player	gxine	X	whaawmp
CD Ripper	asunder	X	grip	X
Disc Burning	gnomebaker ?	X	graveman	orphaned
Image manipulation	mtpaint	X	[MyPaint]	X
Login Manager	SLiM	X	xdm	X
Calculator	galculator	X	xcalc	X
Clipboard Manager	parcellite	X
Wireless	NetworkManager-gnome		wicd, Wifi Radar

Dependencies

• Features/LXDE (done)
• SIGs/Spins/SpinSubmissionProcess
• Some new LXDE apps that should be in the final spin
  • Reviev Requirest: menu-cache
  • Reviev Requirest: lxsession-edit
  • Reviev Requirest: lxmusic

Contingency Plan

• Don't ship the spin

Documentation

Most of the packages ship their own manpages and are well documented

Upstream documentation:

• http://lxde.org/faq.html
• http://lxde.org/wiki/

Release Notes

tbd

Issues/Questions

• (Un)mounting of removable media. Can be done via hald with pcmanfm.
• Inclusion of system-config tools
• What about wireless? We cannot include NM-gnome because it would pull in gconf and friends. Will system-config-network suffice?
• Remove locales or docs to minimize the space requirements?
• get rid of NetworkManager-gnome. ATM there is no proper alternative in Fedora
• get rid of Gconf. ATM several apps require it.

Long Term

• Make Fedora lite even lighter.
  • Firefox -> Midori
  • gnomebaker -> ?
  • ...
• Make Anaconda work with less RAM?
  • Anaconda doing a live install will require less RAM (as it's not doing package installs). Your biggest RAM requirement will be that changes to the live image are kept in RAM and so lower RAM systems suffer on the live images. Requiring that they use persistence (which is landing in Fedora 9) will help, but make things less easy (katzj)
• Encourage cooperation with the RULE Project . Can we integrate (parts of) RULE into Fedora, e.g slinky?

Comments

• I have hard to believe that this stripping down is useful when installer doesn't work with less 512MB of RAM. :-( MatejCepl
  • Huh? I remember I did a graphical install of F7 on a laptop with 256 MB of RAM. ChristophWickert
• For IM and IRC, I propose Pidgin, considering that it works as both the IM Client and IRC solution. - JuanRodriguezMoreno
  • but this would pull in gconf _and_ gstreamer again ... - ChristophWickert
  • pidgin sucks, because it requires a lot of stuff (evolution-data-server, pango), shouldn't we say that our users shouldn't use anything else than Jabber (and IRC via irssi or xchat) and then we can use tkabber (never used, so I am not exactly sure how lightweight it really is). MatejCepl

• What is the target audience for this spin? Beginners, advanced users, experts? This could also affect the used packages (imho emelfm's target is not beginners) SebastianVahl
  • Perhaps users who cannot afford to upgrade their hardware? For example, in the rural or inner cities areas in America, or in the poorer countries elsewhere in the world?

Suggestions for additional packages (by SebastianVahl)

• Multimedia Engine: xine or gstreamer (IMHO the latter would be better)
  • I suggest Xine, IMO gstreamer would blow things up to much. ChristophWickert
  • Movie Player: whaawmp (somehow broken atm; not in Fedora) or gxine (in Fedora) SebastianVahl
    • whaawmp is definitively worth a look if we decide to use gsteamer, otherwise I agree with gxine ChristophWickert
    • whaawmp has one disadvantage in my eyes: it prints a confusing error message when a needed codec for a file isn't installed. SebastianVahl
• Instant Messanging: licq? (never used it; in Fedora)
  • licq would be good because it also ships a gtk interface, but for me it was crashing very often when I tested it :( ChristophWickert
  • The basic licq package in Fedora has a Qt frontend and so Qt as a dependency. And licq-icqnd (the gtk frontend) requires it.
• Additional tools for openbox: obconf, obmenu, with xdg pipe menu )
  • good Idea, I added obconf to the lxde-desktop comps group. The pipe menu is already in the fedora openbox package, so I modified the config in lxde-common to take advantage of it.

ConsoleKit support in slim/xdm

• ATM both login managers don't support ConsoleKit. This would prevent fast user switching and mounting removable devices (eg. via gnome-mount) and maybe other stuff via hal. SebastianVahl
  • this should have already been fixed: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/452156
  • IMO fast user switching is something we can ignore in the light spin. It is most likely that nobody will ever use it if his computer already suffers from limited resources with one user logged in. ChristophWickert
  • With gdm we could have fast user switching, I just enabled in lxsession. Nevertheless I tend to stick with SLiM.

feel free to add a comment

GConf

You wrote several times to not have apps which require GConf. Don't you want apps that _use_ Gconf or don't you want GConf on the live images at all? The latter would be hard to realize because anaconda requires system-config-keyboard which requires firstboot. And firstboot requires metacity (and so GConf and some other Gnome stuff). Eg.: GConf, Metacity and some other Gnome packages are also on the KDE live images. It's not that easy (or maybe impossible in Fedora at this time) to break this dependency chain up. SebastianVahl

I know excluding GConf isn't possible ATM, but I'm happy if it's not needed for runtime of the desktop. ChristophWickert

References

• LXDE Forum - Lightweight applications list: http://forum.lxde.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9
• Xfce Wiki - List of recommended applications: [1]
• tuxmachines.org - Top 5 Tiny Distros: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/26480
• DeviceGuru - Getting to know Ubuntu Lite: http://www.deviceguru.com/getting-to-know-ubuntu-lite/

Credits

A special Thanks goes out to SebastianVahl for his suggestions.

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