blog/data/2010-11-07-skolelinux.txt

   1 Title: Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
   2 Tags: english, nuug, debian edu
   3 Date: 2010-11-07 11:45
   4
   5 <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
   6 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
   7 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
   8 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
   9 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
  10 working using this DVD.</p>
  11
  12 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
  13 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
  14 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
  15 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
  16 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
  17 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
  18 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
  19
  20 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
  21 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
  22 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
  23 Debian archive.</p>
  24
  25 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
  26 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
  27 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
  28 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
  29 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
  30 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
  31 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
  32 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
  33 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
  34 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
  35 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
  36 free X driver should work.</p>
  37
  38 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
  39 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
  40 DVD more useful again.</p>