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.
I was wondering for a long time why don’t we have Inkscape as well as Gimp on the LiveCD. To me personally one and the other complete each other like hand and glove. Strip documentation leave only a quick tutorial and use PackageKit to install the rest of the help when asked
I can’t understand why karmic (which is an LTS) is not going to be shipped on DVD.
and of course the gimp should be in it.
just my 2ps worth
@rowinggolfer
Karmic (9.10) isn’t LTS.
Just move the documentation online if there is that much a need of space. What’s waiting to be put onto it instead anyway?
@faemir: I have no clue
I personally do not do very much work with images. However, I believe that having Gimp on the live cd is very important. On several occassions, I have had my windows-using friends ask me for help performing some image editing task. This task would be very simple to accomplish in an application like Photoshop. However, they do not feel like spending the money on Photoshop for a one time task. So what do I do? I pop in my Ubuntu live cd, and I use the Gimp to edit the image. The Gimp is one of the few useful applications to have on the live cd. Personally, I think that F-Spot serves absolutely no purpose on the live cd. If someone is running a live cd, are they really going to be worrying about tagging their images and creating albums in F-Spot? I can understand people using it in an installed version of Ubuntu, but it is pointless to have on the live cd. In my opinion (all Mon-related issues aside), replacing the Gimp with F-Spot would be a terrible decision to make.
@Nathan Handler: I agree that importing pics from your camera on a.. ram disk is not really helpful
.
Using apps from the Live CD is only one use case for it. It’s also worth noting that whatever is on the Live CD is the base set of applications that most users will end up with on their laptop/desktop computer. Having a photo management application on the Live CD makes about as much sense as having an email client, or bittorrent client. They are all much more useful after they have been installed.
@Alan Pope: good point. I refrained to clutter the post with it, but I think Ubuntu should start thinking about a default set of application to be downloaded during the installation or installed on the first bare-metal run.
Livecd = Default should be decoupled when applicable, imho.
LEAVE GIMP OFF the livecd… what a horrible way to get people start in the open source. I need to edit an Image.. Here gimp…. WTF the UI sucks I could at least use MSPaint on window and get stuff done…
Any user can add or remove applications (subject to having enough RAM) when running a Live CD, before running the ubiquity installer. If a user chooses to remove the gimp, f-spot, or whatever, they can do so by just running Synaptic or “apt-get remove” before they install and those applications will be gone, simple.
The Ubuntu Technical Board, and teams within the Ubuntu Project have decided (and continue to look at) the default set of applications provided on the CD. Those decisions are not taken lightly, but with considerable thought for the technical consequences and the impact that will have on users.
the more i hear about these ridiculous things that are happening…the less and less reasons I have to use this crapshoot we call linux desktop.
You’re so right. GIMP is vital. By all means dump Mono, Banshee and all that other crap but keep GIMP & Rhythmbox.
@Alan Pope: interesting, I didn’t know that ! Are you sure it works ?
Beside that, I wrote that removing the gimp is unlikely. Still considering f-spot a replacement of any kind seems like a joke.
@Jeff little: Oh, I hate Gimp UI. But it works well.
@stefano
The Live CD is an installed system, which gets copied (more or less) to the hard disk when you run Ubiquity. If there is enough RAM you can install whatever you want, add PPAs, update the system and so on. Then finally do the install. Feel free to try it
[...] the GIMP with .NET/Mono in the first place? F-Spot is hardly suitable as an image editor. There is already opposition to this move. How to I scale an image in f-spot ? If there’s a way, I have not been able to find it (same for [...]
It would be awesome if someone made an application that let you drag and drop packages onto a virtual Ubuntu CD seed, to find combinations of packages that will fit. If you removed Gimp, what could you add instead? How much space, exactly, does removing Ekiga save? Which is larger, Pidgin or Empathy? Would removing some of the screensavers provide enough room for some more interesting fonts? And so on.
GIMP should absolutely be kept – but the online documentation issue raises questions – do we want to prevent users with no Internet access from reading the help pages? I’m not convinced – and one of the blockers on Banshee is that it doesn’t have any offline documentation yet. It can’t fairly go both ways.
As for your “50 MiB of runtime”, please try to use *real* numbers, not fabricated ones. Using Jaunty numbers, the runtime PLUS the applications use 54 MiB combined. Of that 54.4 MiB, of which 22.8 MiB are the apps (including documentation), so the actual number for the runtime is 31.6 MiB, including dependencies which are clearly nothing to do with Mono such as SQLite, Glitz, and GMime.
Oh, and gThumb cannot replace F-Spot without some kind of importer (which may well not be possible considering the divergent design of the applications)
Which CD?
@Greg: the Ubuntu LiveCd
/me shakes head. I do not understand what is going on in Ubuntu-land these days. As an aside, I never realized that Rick Spencer, Canonical’s Engineering Manager, Desktop, spent almost 10 years at MIcrosoft.
The GIMP is one of (F)OSS’s best applications.
If you dont include those, i wonder what you are gonna include.
Why dont you remove Mono for example? That will save a lot of space.
GNOME is perfectly usable without it.
Remove GIMP!!!
so that we can find a reason to add another mono app to resize image, if you like
Regarding “Update: oh, btw: this post has a high flame potential. It’s unlikely that the gimp will ever be removed. I hope so, at least
“: I personally feel that you wrote your post in an inflamatory and sensationalistic way, which is completely unnecessary.
A few things “removing gimp from the CD” does NOT mean:
– gimp moving out of main
– gimp getting support from Canonical
– gimp being removed at all
Some of the people discussing here seem to forget how revolutionary it was when Ubuntu was shipped on one single CD with the latest and greatest stuff on it (as opposed to 13 CDs or something). If you really want to make a useful contribution to the discussion, please start investigating how we could save space on the CD (by symlinking duplicate files or splitting out documentation or what not) and bring it up on the development mailing list.
“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.”
Hmmm….. Maybe that’s right. After all, there are non-mono alternatives and you can save space. But then again, Canonical hasn’t really categorised what class of applications it really needs on the liveCD. An office suite is there. An image manipulation application is there…. Why not a basic video editing software? What about a small IDE for let’s say…. programmers? See? There’s no end to what you can include and what you can’t. Everybody’s choice is different. So I have thought of something, but I don’t know if it is economically viable. Canonical should keep the liveCD as it is in their shipit offering, but should allow users to customise the offering online before downloading an iso…. I know it is a little hard to implement, but I’m not saying that they should go outright “Choose whatever you would like….”. Nobody minds open office; so keep it. Mono applications, the mono framework itself, GIMP…. for applications like these and others, ask the downloader. Of course the server is *not* actually creating the iso’s live as per the downloaders requirement. The development team can pre build a few options and then make them available for download, which are searchable on the website using a web app that allows the user to enter filters . Does this take up a *lot* valuable server space?…. I’m sure there are always enough people who are willing to host the images.
@Jo Shields
Quote: “GIMP should absolutely be kept – but the online documentation issue raises questions – do we want to prevent users with no Internet access from reading the help pages?”
Well, ubuntu is actually pretty useless is you don’t have an internet connection. The closed formats problem requires the average-desktop-user-who-listens-to-mp3-instead-of-ogg to download the codecs for these. There are always certain packages you need while performing command line tasks. Moreover…. Ubuntu fits most machines like a bedsheet. So people always have issues related to xyz hardware, for which they can’t do anything but go online. IMHO, a user would be pretty much handicapped on Ubuntu without and internet connection. Not defending the documentation-move, but just raising a point, which I’m sure many people would like to disagree with. BTW….. Microsoft has ported a *lot* of help online!
$ sudo apt-get remove gimp-help-en
[sudo] password for manish:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
python-mako python-beaker
Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gimp-help-en language-support-en language-support-translations-en
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 36 not upgraded.
After this operation, 8757kB disk space will be freed.
Really 20MB will be removed?
Greg: Most versions of Windows include Windows Movie Maker, and most Macs come with iMovie, whereas none of them come with a high-end photo editor. So one candidate to replace Gimp would be a simple video editor (if we had a good one, heh).
Removing Mono wouldn’t make any sense, because then F-Spot and Tomboy would stop working.
We could remove the kernel instead of Gimp. Not end user stuff
@Manish Sinha
Try gimp-help-common which contains all the PNG images
@Jo Shields: nice. Some method to reproduce the numbers you gave ?
This was going to be crazy.
Italian: Sarebbe stato assurdo (ok non è tradotto proprio uguale…).
Gimpitalia.it Administrator
@Lazza: abbastanza
@Stefano Forenza
Using the horrendously manual procedure of “pbuilder login”, install ubuntu-desktop –with-recommends, then purge mono-common libmono0 to get the “total” used by F-Spot, Tomboy, and their runtime dependencies. Then subtract the numbers from their respective “on disk” columns on packages.ubuntu.com
Oh, and for Karmic we should happily break the 50 MiB barrier (assuming Rhythmbox not Banshee) for the footprint of all Mono apps, their docs and their runtime. Intrepid was at about 60 MiB. Plus speed improvements and a drop in RAM consumption.
> “And sure the Gimp UI sucks”
Rather than continuing to hear this bogus, subjective, completely arbitrary judgment from every motormouth with a blog, I’d just as soon the Gimp would be taken away from everybody who complains about it. That would leave the ten of us who use it to get our work done and appreciate it for the masterpiece that it is, to use it in peace.
What’s the big deal? Every time I’ve ever remarked about something left off the live CD, I get “But you can apt-get it!” So you can apt-get it!
Remove Gimp? What a craptastic idea!
If space is such a concern, get rid of Mono, F-Spot and Tomboy, and let’s use Gimp, Eye Of Gnome, and GNote.
If licensing is the concern, get rid of Mono, F-Spot and Tomboy, and let’s use Gimp, Eye Of Gnome, and GNote.
As for getting rid of help files… not everyone has an internet connection. Let’s just alienate them, ok?
I agree that Gimp should remain on the LiveCD. It’s one of the programs I use most commonly. I do agree though that the documentation for Gimp could be put online (I’ve never actually read any of it), which would reduce the installation size.
Lately these developers are coming up with ideas which suck. e.g. new update-manger nagging and notification system.
This system looks great but what if I have already read the alert and want to close it? How about providing it with a little close button? No, they didnt include this feature it stays there until we take a good look at it . Do they want to remember what exactly was the alert 24 hours after?
And yes this one I didn`t know before. I totally agree with the article and the comments. The very basic question : LiveCD is used for trying out Ubuntu and to get things done without hassle. How are we supposed to do image manipulation now?
Thumbs down for removing Gimp!!
Why limit to the size of a CD…DVD’s are the norm now anyway right? To show off all the good stuff available in open source surely we just need to use a bigger disk size….
If sticking to a CD size then why not remove all the useless gnome games…
Where is all this Mono stuff coming from these days? It blew up a few weeks ago from somewhere.. But where? The sudden fuss does make it hard to discount the possibility of astroturfing and Microsoft PR exercises though..
Lets face it.. the apps in question are not earth shaking important tools. They are small useful apps that happen to be written in C#. They are not OS components thankfully, so can be easily replaced, and if someone wants them, they can be downloaded from the repositories and will pull in the runtime automatically.
Thing is. All of a sudden, they are a hot topic.
A note taking app is a hot topic? Anybody find this strange?
Not because it is being installed by default, which it has on several distros for quite a while as far as I know, and did anybody complain? But because someone has replaced it with a non Mono version! Has there been so much written about so trivial a matter before?
I don’t usually follow the conspiracy theory stuff. But this smells funny.
I’m sort of an amateur photographer and spend quite some time and money on my hobby.
I’m a bit oldschool in my approach to photography, i.E. learn how to take a good picture and bother with post processing if it is needed, but remember that a good photographer does not need to post process his pictures much.
No post processing possible on Kodachrome
With this said, I shoot some 100 films a year, mostly B/W, and get some 10GBytes of digital pictures a year.
Since I do love to shoot on film I’m used to editing (sorting and selecting, as an editor does for a magazine) my shots, usualy 2 or 3 on a 36 exp. roll stand out and may be 5 to 10 are worth printing. Same with digital, from 100 shots on a 2GB card I keep some 50 and print 10.
I’m a power photography user but not a power image editor. I use The Gimp for simple prepress tasks like colour balancing, cropping, noise removal and scaling for images I either print myself or give to a lab.
I tried to use F-Spot since it was in the default install, sorry, that’s not for me. In that realm I prefer Picasa, even if it isn’t free as in free speech.
I personally think that GIMP is a very important part of getting people to come over to Linux. I use GIMP on a regular basis as a substitute for PhotoShop. The more I use GIMP the more amazed I am by it’s power. Many Desktop Windows Users rely on PhotoShop for their daily tasks. GIMP makes the transition to Linux for these users relatively pain free. While I do have PhotoShop installed and working in WINE, the GIMP loads much faster and does virtually all of the same things I can do in PhotoShop.
F-Spot is wonderful too. I am in favor of replacing RhythmBox with Banshee and DROPPING TomBoy. It’s useless and annoying. Use text editor if you need to copy text.
Just my two cents.
I agree completely !! After all waste a lot of space in the CD that
could be used for something else would be not smart. What would
be the weight of f-spot ?
$ sudo apet-get install f-spot
………….. treamed list of pre-req ——————-
Suggested packages:
monodoc-gtk2.0-manual libgda2-3 libmono-winforms2.0-cil
The following NEW packages will be installed:
cli-common f-spot libart2.24-cil libflickrnet2.1.5-cil libgconf2.24-cil
libgdiplus libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libglitz-glx1
libgnome-keyring1.0-cil libgnome-vfs2.24-cil libgnome2.24-cil libgtk2.0-cil
libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil
libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-data-tds2.0-cil libmono-data2.0-cil
libmono-getoptions2.0-cil libmono-i18n2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-sqlite2.0-cil
libmono-system-data2.0-cil libmono-system-web2.0-cil libmono-system2.0-cil
libmono0 libmono2.0-cil libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
mono-2.0-gac mono-2.0-runtime mono-common mono-gac mono-jit mono-runtime
0 upgraded, 38 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 11.5MB/11.7MB of archives.
After this operation, 41.9MB of additional disk space will be used.
It will be smarter to take off the 26MiBs of Gimp and put 41.9MiBs of F-spot to reduce the used space.
Funny.
Perhaps it is time to face the music. A CD doesn’t cut it anymore. There needs to be a DVD option.
the gimp rules!!
Hands off indeed! GIMP is a very versatile image editor and if you’ve every used it for any length of time, like any piece of complex editing software, you learn how to use the tools and controls. Give it a rest on the “crappy UI” because its no worse than most.
If the choice is Mono or Gimp, then its pretty clear which one should go.
Heck, even without a choice, Mono should go.
As for Gimp UI, if you really cant use a UI that is different from Photoshop try Gimpshop. Btw, my dad has been retired for over a decade, now uses Linux and knows how to do a few basic retouch images in Gimp. Im sure he’s available to give online courses
This UI thing is getting a little old… and a touch whiny. A UI is a personal thing, not black or white. Its different from Photoshop, that’s a given but just like desktops some people will like it, some wont and some wont care. I use 6 different desktops each day and its all the same to me because my tools are apps not the froufrou decorations but some people HATE the looks of such and such desktop so much that its almost disturbing.
Ubuntu/Gnome is beyond fugly but you wont die from using the caca coloured desktops just like the Mac paradigm isnt a UI made by the gods and annoys a hell of a lot of people in the same ‘its different from how I usually do things so it cant be good’ way.
As for the comment about video editors, the kids have been using KDEnlive for the past 2 months and they do the usual stuff: take a few pix and videos from their digital camera, add some music and put it on Youtube. Pre-teens have no problems doing that stuff so it cant be all bad (I looked at it but never tried it) and probably worth a try.
Not that I use Ubuntu, but that would make no sense. LiveCD is supposed to be a showcase – what will you show when someone asks about image editing? It’s not like with the audio players – there are many good ones (personally, Rhythmbox, Banshee, etc. aren’t among these). Similar with video editors. My blood starts to boil every time I read there are no good ones. Really? And just what universe and dimension are you from? But, image editors? Raster graphics? There’s just GIMP. And really, dislike of UI shouldn’t stop anyone. It’s different, not worse. I’ve no feelings toward it either way, but am unable to see where’s the problem – is it the floating windows?
The post is inflammatory and entirely uncalled for, for something that is not going to happen (and this blog writer knows it). Shame.