On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: Keep it small so it is more obvious Xfce is lightweight ;-). Smaller downloads might attract more users then a full-brown iso with stuff you can download afterward anyway (for the majority of the users at least). Nick

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 02:56:14PM +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote: I agree, I think that with the introduction of Fedora 15 and Gnome3 there will be a heavy population that is "split" into "we <3 gnome-shell" and "we don't <3 gnome-shell" and I think with the introduction and enhancements of Xfce 4.8 that now is a perfect time to showcase the Xfce Spin as an alternative for those users in the latter group. While I agree with the idea of keeping things light, I think going the route of LibreOffice wouldn't be a horrible idea but something that we'd need to consider and maybe run some test on to see how much performance is impacted (especially on older machines and/or netbooks). I feel that currently there are two kinds of people who use the Xfce Spin, those who know what Xfce is and just prefer it and those who use it to save system resources on older machines and/or netbooks. I think members of both groups are likely to desire defaults that are as light weight as possible. So I suppose to wrap it up my question(s) is/are this: at what point are we willing to trade light weight for full featured? where's the line? is there a middle ground? Just some thoughts, I personally have machines with and without Open/LibreOffice on them now just because there are some where its overkill and I'm not particularly heavily for or against its inclusion in the Xfce Spin for Fedora 15 but wanted to bring up a few points for discussion. -AdamM

We should keep Fedora XFCE as small as possible, everyone is free to install whatever he wants. I know that a lot people are using xfce as a replacement for gnome and install their common tools like thunderbird etc. there, but I still think we should steer the course and keep it lightweight. By the way, I like the software we are shipping. At the moment I see no reason why we should use this space. 2011/1/24, Ron Leach <ronleach(a)tesco.net&gt;:

Am Montag, den 24.01.2011, 23:09 +0100 schrieb Dominic Hopf: Because we are wasting space on the media we produce. Ok people, be honest: Who of you doesn't have Openoffice.org installed on his system? Who is using abiword and gnumeric instead? Regards, Christoph

Michael Spahn wrote: We use both, and always for MS-office compatibility - we have no choice because our counterparties require that; some customers even mandate it. OO is better, I think, at 'WORD' compatibility, but Abiword is much quicker to load and become usable. We've experienced real difficulties in 'EXCEL' compatibility and we find that Gnumeric has better xls compatibility than OO. (For our models, anyway.) So, even if OO/LO were to be found to be fairly widely used by XFCE users, we'd strongly vote for Abiword and Gnumeric to remain on the spin. regards, Ron

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:11:12 +0100 Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: In regards to this question; I use abiword and gnumeric instead of writer and calc, however I do agree that openoffice.org should be included, as far as thunderbird I prefer claws and a few other mail clients to it so for the time being I am hoping thunderbird doesn't become the default.

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 18:11 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote: I have both and use AbiWord as often as possible, only falling back on Writer when AbiWord can't do something. I haven't used a spreadsheet in anger for something like a decade and fully intend to keep it that way =) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net

On Mon, 2011-03-07 at 13:41 -0600, Adam Miller wrote: Speaking as a heavy spreadsheet user (!), I think it's fair to say that both Gnumeric and AbiWord have come on in leaps and bounds in the last year or so, particularly in the quality of their format compatibility. I used to only use OpenOffice simply for compatibility reasons, however I've recently given Gnumeric and Abiword another go and now I'm at the stage where I'm considering dumping Ooo completely. Nathan

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: How about including emacs? After all its an amazingly versatile app. ;) -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.

On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:40:42 +0100 Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: gvim is one of the tools I always install on my systems. The second is mc ... So ++ for gvim ;) Regards, Matthias -- Irren ist menschlich. Aber wenn man richtig Mist bauen will, braucht man einen Computer.

Christoph Wickert wrote: We use XFCE on netbooks, for work and for home, and don't have good internet connectivity. I've a couple of suggestions. XFCE does seem suited to netbooks, especially when the 'style' is adjusted to use less of the screen. But netbooks do bring a couple of problems of their own; I'm particularly thinking about drivers for various wireless, Ethernet, bluetooth, and graphics, that are not always in the standard base. Might it be possible to extend the range of hardware supported in the base build? Recent problem areas discussed on the list include RTL 8192, and Intel's GMA500, there may be others, too. Without a decent internet connection, or on the road (for example), the spin becomes the 'install', so I think we should include any missing things that help make it more (generally) usable. SSHFS and FUSE are two that we use, and I cannot remember whether we had to download these as extra. Does NFS and SAMBA (client) come as 'standard'? A SAMBA network browser is useful, too. I'm not sure whether including more 'server-oriented' packages might make sense, perhaps others could comment. My own feeling is that, in setting up a server, one might expect have decent internet connectivity and so the spin needn't contain everything. Servers tend to come in different styles as well; take IMAP for example, some people prefer Cyrus, others prefer Dovecot, and including every sensible option wouldn't really be making the best use of the spin's scarce resource of space. A couple of backup routines would be handy on the spin, again thinking from the point of view of the spin being the base for a fully-usable install on a netbook. We use rdiff-backup on our servers. Finally, and particularly for netbooks which are so convenient to have with you, VLC might be good to include (IIRC I had to retrieve this). Is there (already) a DLNA client(=renderer?) on the spin? Just some ideas to throw in, regards, Ron

On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:51:14 -0700 Kevin Fenzi <kevin(a)scrye.com&gt; wrote: I agree I like the way the default apps are, I like the minimal number of included applications because you can choose what you like. As previously stated a lot of people run xfce instead of gnome because of how lightweight it is and I think after Gnome 3.0 debuts we will see an influx of people trying xfce for the first time and we should give them our very best.

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:14:05 +0100 Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: ok. Yeah. Yeah, except they are useless to us. ;) kevin

Christoph Wickert wrote: + 1 for mc - also something we put onto everything. We also use GWGET, GSTM (from FC12, I think), and also Filezilla, for sFTP when offsite. I think each of these was not on the spin already? Just to re-iterate, with good internet access, these are merely 'nice to have' on the spin. Saves a little time, and could help any newbies who might not otherwise know of them. But, without good internet access, these are pretty useful on the spin so that they become the basic install on, for example, a netbook - which XFCE does seem to be suited for, in our view - and immediately 'ready' to be used on the road. regards, Ron

Christoph Wickert wrote: Agree we should showcase Thunar, no question. Not a Thunar expert, at all, but wasn't sure it could be switched to working through an SSH tunnel, whereas Filezilla can be - FZ can be set to proxy through an arbitrary port on localhost. Can Thunar be set up to do that, too, perhaps in the new version? Ok, sounds good. We're only using F14 repo and RPMfusionF14 repo, so maybe we just found the file in an earlier release archive and did some kind of direct install. On our systems (both FC13, and FC14, on different netbooks), gpk tells us we are running gstm-1.2-11.fc12 We do find that the graphical manager helps; SSH's command line syntax seems to easily trip us up with its variations of tunnel schemes and port addresses and destination address, and forwards, etc. Just a quick comment on Thunderbird. We've had to stop using it. It just seems impossible to set up the current version to use secure IMAP on a local network. Its 'new' auto-setup scheme keeps trying to reach a POP ISP-type of system. We're using Claws now on FC14. Christoph, whatever you decide from all the suggestions you get will be good (the existing spins are pretty good in my view given the CD limitation) - my wish is only to let you know what we as a user find that we need and, more importantly, why. (Our work is mostly offsite.) Hopefully, with everyone's suggestions and ideas, the spin will represent a good compromise. regards, Ron