Bonus Discs!

[Dweeberkitty]

I saw this about the Elive distro:

In the near future, the Elive team is preparing more Bonus Discs for many user categories, such as:

• Gaming
• Designers
• Musicians
• Video production
• Enterprises
• Schools
• Servers
• Developers

All these discs are created for inexperienced users, or for those that prefer an easy, canny and complete way of installing things on their machines. All you have to do is download the ISO, burn it on a blank CD or put it on a USB stick, insert the bonus disc in your optical drive (or plug the USB stick into the USB port) and click the "Install Bonus Disk" button. Everything will be done automatically for you.

What do you think? Is this something that Vector might be able to do? All that would be necessary would be to include all the appropriate packages + a shell script, make an iso and Vector would have add-on discs that would be good for someone who's VL box doesn't have internet access (I know some people who don't) This is something I'd be willing to work on.

I think the main advantages of something like this would be an easy and quick way for someone to setup their VL installation with the appropriate programs for each of those uses listed above. Sure someone can just use the online repositories and manually download and install each program but I have found myself in situations where I can't do that for one reason or another. Plus it's kind of a pain to have to install all those programs manually and/or compile them yourself.

So, what do you think? I think that we could start making lists of the programs that someone would want on each of those "bonus discs" and then go from there. Shouldn't be too hard should it? Plus in the meantime, we might make some valuable additions to the VL repository.

Here's the bonus discs part of the Elive site:
http://www.elivecd.org/gb/Download/Bonus_Disks/

I don't know if it's a good idea or not, it's just a thought.

[The Headacher]

What do you think? Is this something that Vector might be able to do?

Probably.

I do sort of dislike the idea of getting all those programs installed without having a choice though.
Just because I like working with audio doesn't mean I want all the audio programs that fit on a cd to be installed to my harddrive.

Here's some programs I'd put on a "musicians" cd if there was going to be one:

- Jack audio connection kit (the back bone of audio production in Linux)
- Qjackctl
- audacity
- mhwaveedit (with jack support)
- jack-rack
- jack beat
- muse
- Rosegarden
- lmms
- Hydrogen
- Mixxx
- ardour
- Beast (if they released a "stable" version that compiles with newer versions of guile)
- wired
- timemachine

I already packaged most of these for the repo.

Please note I'm not going to put effort in this plan, but I'm not really opposed to it either .

[caitlyn]

Once upon a time a distro called Red Hat Linux (now Fedora Core) had something called Power Tools.  It was a CD of extra apps in addition to the one CD that contained the actual distro.  Initially (think Red Hat 5.x circa 1998) it was just a bunch of rpms.  Later, though, a little GUI tool was added to let you pick and choose which apps you wanted.  If Vector could do it with that sort of approach rather than all or nothing I would be all for the sort of discs you are proposing.

GoblinX has the all or nothing approach.  I hate it.  The idea that I have to have seven music players to get the one I want is silly.  I guess I'm with The Headacher on this one.

[roseway]

A bonus disk needn't install everything automatically. It could be used as a local repository from which the user chooses which apps to install. There's a lot of merit in the idea, but also a lot of work of course. I'd be happy to help (insofar as my limited skills permit).