Hi,
Allow me to shortly introduce myself, since I'm new to this list. I'm an Austrian sysadmin living in Montpezat (South France). I'm in charge of computers (servers and desktops) in eleven small communities that migrate from Windows to Linux. Institutions like public libraries and town halls get networked, and every Windows installation is replaced by a GNU/Linux system. I had tested various (a dozen or so) distributions, and we finally settled with CentOS (both server and desktop), which we like very much. The current desktop we use is the default GNOME, and XFCE on older hardware.
From time to time, I fiddle with the KDE desktop, and my impression is always the same: 1) it's great! 2) it's cluttered! KDE has a series of really great apps (Konqueror file manager, K3B, KMail, ...), but the problem is: it's not very modular. More often than not, one has to install a whole bunch of useless - and often redundant - apps in order to just have one little app. For example, in order to have the music player JuK, I would have to install kdemultimedia-extras, which gives me a whole lot of other players I will never use.
I know I'm not the first to complain about this state of things, and various distributions have already taken steps to find a solution. Debian has broken up KDE packages, so you can install just the packages you want. Arch Linux has the kdemod project, which is great also. Gentoo does something similar, IIRC. And there's a german Slackware-based distribution called Pocket Linux which does just that: take the cholesterol out of KDE.
So I just thought I would drop a note on the -devel list: to suggest a "KDE Light" project for CentOS. Ideally, I would have a minimal system and X11, and a simple 'yum groupinstall 'KDE Light'' would give me a minimal KDE desktop.
I'm curious to have your opinions about this.
Cheers,
Niki Kovacs
Niki Kovacs wrote:
Hi,
Allow me to shortly introduce myself, since I'm new to this list. I'm an Austrian sysadmin living in Montpezat (South France). I'm in charge of
G'day
An important thing to understand about CentOS is that it's not _exactly_ a distribution in its own right. It's one of several built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, and aims to be pretty much a drop-in replacement for it.
The major distinguishing feature of these RHEL clones is the support: if one has the real thing, then (with few exceptions) one also has the paid-for support.
If you don't want to pay the RH fees, then CentOS is a good choice. You won't have official RH support (or costs), and you won't have the certifications regarding compatibility with other vendors (such as Oracle), but as far as packaging and performance are concerned, it's determined by RH.
There are some additional packages available for CentOS, but don't expec those packages which RH ships to be built or packaged differently.
Off-hand, I don't know of a clone that seeks to package those packages differently. It's not something I'd counsel.
For something a little different but a little like CentOS, take a look at Fedora.
Fedora has more packages and it has more recent technology, but it's no featherweight either. And, I generally describe it as a rolling beta - it's a development (as in developing RHEL) platform, and it's perfectly possible that your system won't boot after some update (typically kernel).
You might also take a look at Kubuntu (and Edubuntu for different reasons), both built from Debian. Like Fedora, there are regular new releases, and mostly the supported life is fairly short, but like RHEL there are occasional long life versions.
SUSE has a similar model to RH/Fedora , except that (AFAIK) the long-life (aka enterprise) versions cost and I've not heard of any clones. The free version is OpenSUSE and they must be planning on releasing 10.3 or 11.0 RSN.
But really, this is more a user question;-)
On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 16:07 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
But really, this is more a user question;-)
Well, I think he was asking whether developing a separate repository that provides more fine-grained KDE packages is useful, rather than which distros provide split-up KDE packages.
-- Daniel
Daniel de Kok a écrit :
On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 16:07 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
But really, this is more a user question;-)
Well, I think he was asking whether developing a separate repository that provides more fine-grained KDE packages is useful, rather than which distros provide split-up KDE packages.
Yes, exactly. I know what CentOS is about (RHEL minus support), and I don't want to use another distribution. I also know that normally it only uses Red Hat packages.
My concern was indeed about the feasibility of an external repo containing a bundle of "KDE light" packages. I remember (from Slackware) that KDE packages can be rebuilt without certain stuff, using the DO_NOT_COMPILE=xxxxx yyyy zzzz variable. In fact, I've done it before, but I don't quite know how to do this the CentOS way, if I may say so.
Any suggestions?
Niki Kovacs
Niki Kovacs wrote:
My concern was indeed about the feasibility of an external repo containing a bundle of "KDE light" packages. I remember (from Slackware) that KDE packages can be rebuilt without certain stuff, using the DO_NOT_COMPILE=xxxxx yyyy zzzz variable. In fact, I've done it before, but I don't quite know how to do this the CentOS way, if I may say so.
Any suggestions?
Now might be a good time to talk to Rex, is he on the list ? If something is possible - I, for one, would really like to see the idea bounce past him once.
Karanbir Singh a écrit :
Now might be a good time to talk to Rex, is he on the list ? If something is possible - I, for one, would really like to see the idea bounce past him once.
The best implementation of this idea, IMHO, seems to be Arch's kdemod project: http://www.kdemod.ath.cx/
It would be just *great* to have a similar project for CentOS. Unfortunately, I don't quite have the technical abilities to offer any serious help for this. So far, I've only fiddled a bit with lightening up KDE packages under Slackware.
Cheers,
Niki Kovacs
On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 12:43 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:
Karanbir Singh a écrit :
Now might be a good time to talk to Rex, is he on the list ? If something is possible - I, for one, would really like to see the idea bounce past him once.
The best implementation of this idea, IMHO, seems to be Arch's kdemod project: http://www.kdemod.ath.cx/
It would be just *great* to have a similar project for CentOS. Unfortunately, I don't quite have the technical abilities to offer any serious help for this. So far, I've only fiddled a bit with lightening up KDE packages under Slackware.
Niki, you are a quick learner, so don't dismiss the idea of doing stuff to fast :). Though I agree with Karanbir, that it should be bounced past Rex.
-- Daniel
Niki Kovacs wrote:
Karanbir Singh a écrit :
Now might be a good time to talk to Rex, is he on the list ? If something is possible - I, for one, would really like to see the idea bounce past him once.
The best implementation of this idea, IMHO, seems to be Arch's kdemod project: http://www.kdemod.ath.cx/
It would be just *great* to have a similar project for CentOS. Unfortunately, I don't quite have the technical abilities to offer any serious help for this.
Basically, upstream kde bundles everything, so Fedora/RHEL packaging generally follows suit(1). To split each app/library, as you're suggesting, packaging work/complexity increases by orders of magnitude.
Now, some similar work on this went into fedora 7, where apps not considered "best of breed" were split into kde*-extras packages, like the "juk in kdemultimedia-extras" example you mentioned (since amarok is clearly superior, imo. :) )
Having said that, if this is still something you feel passionate about, it would require a significant amount of work, so... patches welcome, (co)maintainers needed. As Fedora is RHEL's (and CentOS's) upstream, the best place to go help make this happen is to join the Fedora KDE SIG: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE
-- Rex
(1) exceptions exist, especially where disk/dependency savings are great, and pkg-split implementations are simple.
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Daniel de Kok -
John Summerfield -
Karanbir Singh -
Niki Kovacs -
Rex Dieter