shrinking the desktop DVD image to 1.5GB

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 03:50:30PM -0700, Allison Randal wrote:
> Following on the tail of this, a few of us have been talking more about
> the idea of shrinking the 4.3GB DVD image down to a 1.5GB flash card/USB
> stick/DVD image. It's looking interesting enough to be worth talking
> about it more broadly.
> 
> - Does a 1.5GB image sound useful?

It does.  It's only double the size of the CD iso, rather than six times
as is the case with the regular DVD, so an easier download proposition.

> - 1.5GB is what we keep coming back to, because it's a nice size to fit
> on a cheap 2GB flash card/USB stick with room for formatting and
> persistent data storage. It's about double the size of the current CD
> image, which allows plenty of room for a generous desktop image, without
> the painfully large download of the 4.3GB image. What other size
> considerations come to mind?

I think the download bandwidth is probably the more important factor
here.  $5 will get a 2GB usb drive today; next year the same amount will
probably get a 4 or 8GB drive.  Year after that you probably won't be
able to even find 2GB drives.

So, you probably don't need to be as strict about the size limit over
time, the way we have to be for CDs.

> - What should we cut from the current DVD image (currently a superset of
> desktop, alternate, and server)? Or, perhaps more simply, what would be
> worth adding beyond the current 700MB CD image?

If we have the machinery to produce language-specific CDs, could that
same machinery be used to produce language-specific USB isos?  If so,
then only one language per image is necessary.  Looks like that'd give
back a lot of space.

Would be nice to see a diff of the DVD manifest vs. CD, with package
sizes, so we can see what packages would give back the most space to
drop.

As far as stuff worth adding, maybe look first at apps we've had to drop
like gimp and various office tools.  A few more games might be nice.
I'd love to see Inkscape included.  What about frequently needed
proprietary codecs or drivers?

Bryce