[oclug]brownie points to mandrake

[Shad Young]

After the SuSE 8.1 trial, I restored the system back to my beloved
Mandrake and decided this time to see how small I could make the system
without breaking any dependencies and including a nearly complete set of
test servers/productivity apps, both major WMs, and development tools
and IDE's.

Let me start by saying, Mandrake's minimum install (using their
installers) is smaller than SuSE 8.1. In fact it is so small, I had a
fully working X and KDE in under 320mb. This is smaller than Win98SE
after updates and SuSE 8.1 is up to 300mb w/o X.

Needless to say the system is not very usable at this point, but neither
is Windows. After installing all of the applications I wanted, including
games and multimedia, updating the system and adding third party SW not
included with the distro, total install size (not including /home, /swap
or /boot, but including /var) is 1.43 gig. This is smaller than XP by a
factor of 2 yet containing nearly double the number of applications.

I also discovered that the lists in the MDK CP installer are not equal.
When you select alphabetical sort about 1000 more apps show up,
including some tools I had never seen before and some I thought had gone
missing. Discovering Kedutainment was cool. Been practicing my touch
typing ... f f j j f j f f j heh heh.

There is still some garbage software installed, stuff I will never use
and do not need, but again I was trying not to break any dependencies.
Things like 10 mb of fax SW simply because KDE-Utils depends on them and
such. The main problem is it is very time consuming to install a system
this way.

Shad