Re: [Fedora-music-list] Audio spin media

[Brendan Jones]

On 05/25/2012 12:37 PM, Jørn Lomax wrote:
>  On Thu, 2012-05-24 at 22:19 -0400, Christopher R. Antila wrote:
> > On 05/24/2012 09:25 PM, Brendan Jones wrote:
> >> Jorn's posts this week have got me thinking about what we should
> >> be aiming for in terms of install media. As others have noted
> >> before a CD sized spin is kind of outdated, and I wondered whether
> >> we were in fact bound by this. So I raised it with releng on IRC
> >> and we are not.
> > Thinking is dangerous. That's why we do it!
> >
> >> In light of this I propose that we abandon the idea of a 'lite'
> >> spin complemented by a larger DVD version, and just focus on one
> >> Live image.
> >>
> >> It would be nice if its under 1G but that again should not be a
> >> boundary that we need adhere to?
> >>
> >> Raising here for comment.
> > This is a serious issue, and it's related to "who will be using the
> > spin?" Actually, it's "who wants to use the spin?" and the
> related
> > question of whether we're okay with disallowing some of them.
> >
> > And here's the potentially offensive part...
> >
> > If we're just going to be stodgy old white men with lots of resources,
> > then we can forget about a media requirement at all, because everybody
> > has a 16GB USB drive and high-speed cable Internet nowadays, so why do
> > we still make CDs?
> >
> > Of course I'm exaggerating--nobody said it, or was even implying it
> > (even Brendan's more-than-CD spin was suggested at 1GB, which is
> > modest compared to the 3.5GiB of Mageia I downloaded yesterday). So
> > the reality of this is that we have the power and we can do whatever
> > we want. Because we're The Fedora Project, we have a responsibility to
> > ensure accessibility for as wide an audience as possible.
> >
> > But let's take this further. We don't just want to ensure everybody
> > has access to our spin, we want to ensure everybody has an equally
> > rich, first-class experience. Especially if we call the CD version
> > "Lite," it's not going to give that impression, whatever the actual
> > experience would be.
> >
> > So... let's have only one version, make it as small as possible, and
> > certainly ensure it fits on one CD! This obviously means we won't have
> > many applications installed by default, but I don't see that as a
> > problem for two reasons:
> > 1.) the applications aren't the reason for the Spin, it's the integration.
> > 2.) I don't know about you, but I don't use everything we've been
> > thinking of putting on the spin, so why should everybody have to
> > download everything?
> >
> > It's always a question of compromise and balance.
> >
> >> For the sake of argument, lets say size doesn't matter, what then
> >> should we use as the default desktop environment? To me its a
> >> choice between Qt v. GTK environments - personally I'm yet to find
> >> a gnome 3 workflow that works for me, however others may have
> >> different opinions.
> >>
> >> XFCE or KDE I think gives us a little more freedom in how we govern
> >> the whole look and feel of the spin (and packaging something like
> >> a customized fedora-audio-panel for example), but that's not to say
> >> we can't write a gnome extension to do the same.
> > In this case, and because of what I said previously, we might be best
> > off choosing a GUI toolkit first (Qt, like most of the audio
> > applications) and the smallest desktop environment next (Qt Razor or
> > Razor Qt).
> >
> > Again, it's about access for everybody. Sure thing my computer can run
> > GNOME 3 and KDE-based applications at the same time while still making
> > good-quality recordings, but not everybody has my computer.
> >
> >> And while I'm at it, what are we going to call this thing? Fedora
> >> (Audio) studio / Fedora Audio / Free Audio (I'm reaching now)
> > Let's call it "The Spin." It sounds misguidedly epic.
> >
> >
> > Christopher.
> > _______________________________________________
> > music mailing list
> > music(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music
>
>  I have to say i agree with Brendon. I don't think there is anything
>  wrong by not making the spin fit onto a CD. If you have a computer that
>  is capable of running realtime audio processing, chances are that you
>  have a DVD drive. I actually find it hard to even find blank CDs in the
>  store, so I always en up using a DVD as media (more often usb now).
>
>  But what i think is the best solution is to first create a spin that is
>  focused on the user experience. Make sure it's simple, intuitive, is
>  easy to use and has the software we all feel it needs in there. For all
>  we know, it might actually fit onto a CD while still meeting those
>  criteria. Once we have done that, we can look at it and see, "what can
>  we drop", or "does it need more", all depending in it's size. But i
>  think the user experience should come first. But yes, *one* version :) 
OK, maybe that's a better approach - select the DE, the applications and
see how big it is and decide later on the size.

Have a look here
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=music-creation.git;a=summary to see
some kickstarts already in place. The last one I did (based on LXDE) I
think blew it out about 90M over a CD and that was based on LXDE.
However, Frescobaldi has since been written in python and doesn't pull
in all the KDE packages so now it probably is under that size. I
included all the applications/plugins I could think of so there's a
still a fair bit of room to move (As Chris said some of the sound fonts
are huge)

>  That's my two cents at least
>
>  Please keep the discussion of which desktop environment we need going. I
>  think this is something we should settle on soon. I'm a partial to gnome
>  and xfce (I actually love gnome 3). But i do see the argument that most
>  applications use Qt. Is there a distro where i can try razor Qt?
>
>  -Jørn 
There's actual a repo maintained by the developers of Razor that you can
use in Fedora 16. Going down this path would be awesome (I love razor)
however its a lot of work as you'd have to package all of this in Fedora
(Qastools is already packaged). Even though upstream have done all the
work here it might be dangerous to go down this path - we could spend
too much time tailoring the DE rather than concentrating on Audio
configuration etc. But check it out

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/QtDesktop/Fedora_16/