KDE light?

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
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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




-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaacoco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaacoco.merseine.nu

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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

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