Really, you wouldn’t dare..
- rickspencer3 proposes pulling the gimp from the CD:
- It takes up a lot of space that we need for couchdb, etc…
- F-Spot has key features, like crop and red-eye removal
- It’s a power user tool, users shouldn’t stumble into it
- Discussion points brought up that
- The gimp currently uses 26 megs of space, 20 of which are documentation, which could be moved online
- The gimp, though not totally user friendly, is very useful, and does not require “importing” to edit
ZOMG !
No offense to Rick Spencer but.. How reasonable is the rationale behind this ? That f-spot is enough ? Enough for what ? For laughing ?
How do I scale an image in f-spot ? If there’s a way, I have not been able to find it (same for red eyes). How do I annotate an image (putting text somewhere) ?
Yet people ask “Gimp is cool but.. should it belong to LiveCD?” I’ll give you a better question: what should belong to the LiveCD ?
Removing GIMP from the LiveCd fully defeats the showing off purpouse of the LiveCd and leaves you without any handy tool to perform even basic manipulation on images. Now, it can be just me, but I can’t find anything useful in that regard inside Jaunty’s f-spot.
I can’t see how f-spot belongs to the live cd more than the Gimp. And sure the Gimp UI sucks (at least, I hate it. Not that I love f-spot‘s though) but it can take burden of tasks that nothing else provides. Should we leave our users without even basic image manipulation, just like OS X users ? Shouldn’t Ubuntu be better than that ?
Resolution
The following decision has been taken:
- The current plan of record is:
- Keep the gimp in the default install
- If we need the room, switch the gimp to online only documentation
- If we still need the room, kick it out altogether
Sanity prevailed. Sort of. I mean, I’m happy with at least the first two points of it. 
I hate bringing up the old Mono issue (and my prophetic joke) every 2 minutes, but.. if you need space, why not strip 50mb of run-time ? How come it’s desirable to replace Rhythmbox with Banshee (based on minimal feature difference) and then having to strip the Gimp ?
An emergency plan would be to strip Mono, replace Banshee with Rhythmbox, replace Tomboy with Gnote (about which many untrue things have been told) and f-spot with gThumb or Solang (which is promising) and gain 40-50 mb of disk space. Not stripping the Gimp.
This is not out of Mono hate, is out of need.
@MKx
If its being discussed then I think it should be made public. Why hide things from the user community? Is there something to hide?
Mono junk infiltration:
I run Kubuntu KDE 4.3 RC1 and wanted to know the specifics of my system hardware. To my surprise, Mono junk is heavily used by this application. Well, even though it is for testing only, I don’t want no garbage on my system, so I aborted the process. Here is what happened.
sudo apt-get install sysinfo
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
binfmt-support cli-common libgconf2.24-cil libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgtk2.0-cil
libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-i18n2.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil
libmono-system2.0-cil libmono0 mono-2.0-gac mono-2.0-runtime mono-common mono-gac mono-jit
mono-runtime
Suggested packages:
monodoc-gtk2.0-manual libgdiplus libmono-winforms2.0-cil
The following NEW packages will be installed:
binfmt-support cli-common libgconf2.24-cil libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgtk2.0-cil
libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-i18n2.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil
libmono-system2.0-cil libmono0 mono-2.0-gac mono-2.0-runtime mono-common mono-gac mono-jit
mono-runtime sysinfo
0 upgraded, 19 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 6824kB of archives.
After this operation, 21.1MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.
Mono insanity ensues?!
I say leave GIMP on the Live CD, exchange Gnote for Tomboy notes; and gThumb Image Viewer and gthumb Photo Import Tool for F-Spot.
I have always disliked F-spot for some reason, I guess I was used to Google’s Picasa, that I used on the ‘other’ operating system. In any case I never became fond of F-spot. Then I tried gThumb, which has more image tools than F-spot, of course not as many as GIMP, but there is a good collection in gThumb. Gnote looks just like Tomboy, as it is supposed to, it is just using a different computer language (C++) instead of Mono.
I am not too much into the Mono controversy, but I am suspicious about why is is used, and wonder if it will become another VFAT/TomTom like problem later as the Linux distros gain popularity.
If space is the issue here, then why not drop the CD for a DVD. In this day and age there is no reason not to. From the standard equipment point of view, DVD’s have replaced CD and in a few years it will be replaced by Blu-Ray. High speed internet access has gained wider penetration with fewer and fewer on dial-up and even fewer still without. Why pin yourself up against an artificial 700Mb barrier, when you can switch to a widely accepted media with a much higher capacity and give yourself all the breathing room you need to expand?
I have an idea… how about making Ubuntu less bloated?
dvilla, that is not an idea, that is an aspiration. If you have specific ideas on how to make Ubuntu use less disc space, by all means share them.
A desktop live cd without gimp? My first reaction is LOL. Second reaction, trying to be as objective as possible: did you ever notice any other distro considering replacing gimp in its default install? A gtk based distro substitutes gimp because of space problems, loading mono/qt/whatever based stuff? Please. And strategically, is there any gain from canonical to do what novell executives like?
Luckily ubuntu users which don’t like the direction the distro is taking can fall back on debian or fall sideways on sidux, mepis, whatever.