antiX-forum

Sounds good!

I know the iso has grown, but antix is all about offering gui and cli tools. Here's a cli ripper I found in th repo: ripit. And here's a link to the website:

http://www.suwald.com/ripit/ripit.html

I think it pulls in one perl dependency.

john

Hello. I just installed ogle and ogle-gui from the repos. It seems like a lightweight video player. It can even access dvd menus. It hasn't been updated since 2005, but it seems solid. Here's a link

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/links.shtml

It really only plays dvds so it can't replace mplayer, but if we just want a player that can access dvd menus, then this may be a better choice than gxine since it should have less dependencies. So instead of mplayer + gxine, we could have mplayer + ogle. This will help reduce the iso size by a little bit.

EDIT
Or maybe just include mplayer and let the user decide what they want to install on top of it; e.g., if we only had gmplayer installed, then my first choice would be to install vlc so that I can have access to dvd menus and have a nice little music manager as well (but I would still need mplayer for dvd backups and it handles some files better than vlc). With gxine on the iso, I would be more likely to keep it and install gmusicbrowser as my music manager. But I like vlc better than gxine + gmusicbrowser.

Also, some more moves that may reduce the size:
(replace ... with ... )
grip > ripperx
xmms, gmpc > alsaplayer gtk
ncmpc > alsaplayer text
iceweasel, claws > seamonkey

I don't know how much space can be saved by using these apps, but they are all excellent choices. Perhaps they are not the most popular choices, but work well. And in the case of grip, it has given me popups about being an experimental version for years. At least ripperx has been stable for awhile now. Just trying to help.

EDIT
I think the real challenge in reducing the iso size of antix is that we have an excellent set of applications installed. So how can you swap them for apps with a smaller footprint? Maybe the direction to go in is to find a way to tame Lenny; i.e. remove the bloat that's been installed recently and find a way to make sure it doesn't come back. Otherwise, no matter how much space we save by swapping apps and/or going pure gtk2 apps, if Lenny keeps inflating our base system, then our gains will be lost. Just thinking out loud.

john

Here are a few other thoughts on this subject.

I don't know if a little size creep...emphasis on "little"...is necessarily a bad thing. antiX is a great overall system, which can be used on new or old hardware. It has found a niche, however, by those using hardware that is 3-10 years old. As time passes the "old" hardware becomes more advanced.

If the system size and requirements creep upward in antiX on a curve matching the equipment of majority use...everything is fine.

I myself have phased out many of my P3's. Parts break or wear out and it's not worth replacing when I can buy a used P4 system with 1 GB of RAM for $100. I used to have 4 old P3 systems. Now I'm down to 2. And not using them at the moment.

My issue with the size is only because of my internet access. I use a satellite to connect which in itself isn't bad but during large downloads you get throttled back. Max speed is about 65Kb and during a download it can get down to as low as a few b/s. So as far as I'm concerned the smaller the better and hopefully complete as possible.

Well, as you can see in the new announcement, we have another test version available and anticapitalista has managed to provide a few new things yet keep the size under 400 MB, tipping in, according to his announcement, at around 397 MB. Pretty good, will that do it for you?

Sounds good to me!