removing packages for edubuntu on old pcs (edubuntu for day care, philippines)

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sat, 23 Sep 2006, maning sambale wrote:

> The oldest pc machine we have for our project is:
> 
> PC Celeron 333mhz, 128MB, 4.3GB Hard disk (256MB for swap), S3 4MB
> Video card, 3COM LAN card, Sampo 14" monitor, NTC serial keyboard, MS
> PS2 mouse.  No CD-ROM drive, no usb port, no speaker (not even an
> internal).
> 
> Given the hardware restrictions, any advise which packages I need to remove?

> You can view the package list here:
> http://cosca-dlsu-cwts.wikispaces.com/space/showimage/package_list.txt

The thing to look at, I would suggest is a package list with sizes included
it.  It's rather unrewarding picking out packages at random and removing
them to find you just saved 500KB.

This command will give you a sorted list of package sizes.

dpkg-query -Wf '${Package}\t${Installed-Size}\n' |sort -rgk2 |less

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org/msg11231.html

Looking at your list, I notice you have OpenOffice, Abiword and Gnumeric.
If you can afford to stick with the latter two and remove the OpenOffice
components, I suspect that should save you about 200MB.

	openoffice.org-core     81200
	openoffice.org-common   57456
	openoffice.org-help-en-us       22536
	openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us  21228
	openoffice.org-writer   10700
	openoffice.org-calc     9420
	openoffice.org-base     7668
	openoffice.org-l10n-en-gb       6744
	openoffice.org-l10n-en-za       5080
	openoffice.org-draw     4604
	openoffice.org-java-common      3032
	openoffice.org-l10n-en-us       2564
	openoffice.org-impress  2144
	openoffice.org-math     964
	openoffice.org-gtk      544
	openoffice.org-evolution        272
	openoffice.org-gnome    228
	openoffice.org-l10n-common      196
	openoffice.org  24

those values are in kbytes.

Others that look large are Evolution, gcompris, zope3 (schooltool needs
this) and any extra kernels you have installed (you need at least one
working kernel obviously).  Of course, you need to check if you need these
packages.  Depending on the age group, gcompris might be very useful.

Gavin