Applications selection discussion....

[Jim Gettys]

On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 21:40 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> Some comments inline :
> 
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 8:38 PM, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
> 
> >
> > Fonts
> > We'll need to sort through a lot of these and nuke a lot
> > of bitmap and other fonts (e.g. type1, etc).
> >
> 
> Wrt fonts: I would suggest having the Dejavu series of fonts and the
> Liberation series. The primary target is G1G1 users, as per my
> understanding, and in that case, these two fonts should cover most of
> the requirements.

Yes, until we get into eastern languages.  But I don't want to go there
initially....

Anyone care to spend some time to package a set of font aliases to cause
use of outline fonts for the common antique bitmap families?  This would
be good in general to start weaning people off those disk space
wasters....

I did this for at least a few fonts in the OLPC build (necessary if you
run into any bitmap font applications), but stopped once we got flash
and java to run that had such dependencies.



> >
> > Definite ins
> > ------------
> > Gnumeric
> > Abiword
> > Firefox (some may question this, but I'm not yet sold on webkit)
> 
> Some suggest that Epiphany is lighter than firefox at times - I'm not
> sure whether this is true or not. Also, if Epiphany-webkit is packaged
> for Fedora, I would definitely like to give it a shot.

Data, RAM usage, disk footprint and compatibility would be needed to
make a webkit sale.  
  o Firefox 3 has done seriously better on memory consumption at the
time of its release than other browsers, but it's a (constantly) moving
target....  
  o Also note since Sugar's browse is based on Gecko/Xulrunner, there is
sharing there when sugar is installed; installing something else would
go to the detriment of the combined footprint for including Sugar. 

Unless such data appears and is very compelling, I think Firefox is it,
at least unless we decide to convert sugar's browse to webkit.  I
therefore don't plan to spend any time on this evaluation personally.

> > 7) music player Rhythmbox? or something else? There are many to choose
> > from.
> >
> 
> The other major contender would be banshee - it's dependency on Mono
> leaves it out.
> 

Ah, that makes it an easy choice, unless there is a third option....

-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child