Windows FOSS on the Live CD -- the OOo2 question

[Eric Dunbar]

PS Sounder -- this was the original post. I guess there's already
Windows FOSS on the Live CD... did not know that (as a Mac user ;-).

Eric.

Henrik Nilsen Omma 	
<henrik at ubuntu.com>to ubuntu-desktop, ubuntu-devel
 More options	  Feb 21 (22 hours ago)

I'd like to poll people's views on the content of the Windows FOSS on
the Live CD. In the past we have adjusted the Win-FOSS to fit the
available space quite close to the end of the process, but it might be
worth taking a longer view now.

How do people use it? Is it something that end user find valuable? This
is the current collection on Ubuntu 5.10:

Firefox 4.7mb
Gaim 6.6mb
OpenOffice 77.1mb
Other CD content 13-15mb

Total: 100mb

The big space-hog as always is OpenOffice.org 2.0. It takes up 77 MB of
space (compressed), and is then only available in English (a different
language is a separate install). If we removed OOo2 we could add several
other applications, and still save considerable space. An example:

Firefox 4.7mb
Gaim 6.6mb
Thunderbird 6.1mb
Abiword 5.0mb
Gimp 15mb
MoinMoin Desktop 3.2mb
7-zip 0.8mb
Other CD content 13-15mb

Total: ~57mb


The 'other CD content' is the stuff that makes it browseable. This
includes the Gecko-based CD bowser and content files including images
like screenshots. We could potentially add some items to this, like a
PDF version of the 'Great Features of Ubuntu' document and possibly some
wallpapers.

I see three main issues with removing OpenOffice: First it is a
cornerstone piece of FOSS that has an important role in getting a
foot-hold on the Windows platform (but less important than Firefox). It
has the best support for MS-Office files of the Free office suites. And
third, it is what we ship with Ubuntu, so it presents a unified picture,
making it clear that you can run many of the same applications on
several platforms and you can then painlessly move your data between them.

The question is whether these three points are important enough to
outweigh the limitations on space. The the saved 30-77mb we can add a
lot of cool stuff.

Among that stuff could be example content (and language packs).  With
more space we could include more pictures, OOo presentations, several
pieces of music, a decent video clip, gimp files with multiple layers, etc.

Thoughs?

- Henrik