XFCe Variant without Gnome Dependencies

[Rava]

What about a slim variant of current XFCe versi9on (which is: 2.0) without any libraries and other dependencies but the ones from XFCe itself?

Like, leaving away all any any Gnome binaries and Gnome libs, like Galculator, exchanging these programs with slim non-Gnome-ones? XFCe should have some, like a calculator, and a GUI wrapper for mplayer, like gnome-mplayer...

This is meant to create a even smaller XFCe version of Porteus, and it should be possible to create, or not?
Meant for older systems like Mono-Kernel machines, and users that prefer XFCe over LXDE.

Code: Select all

# apropos gnome
gnome-mplayer    (1)  - a simple GUI for MPlayer
gparted                (8)  - Gnome partition editor for manipulating disk partitions
xml-config [xml2-config] (1)  - script to get information about the installed version of GNOME-XML

According to apropos, there is not much installed concerning gnome, but it not even lists Galculator.

And is there even a gnome-free version of gparted?

[Ahau]

You're more than welcome to work on it, and if you'd like I can post my sources and buildscripts for you to work from.

I've already stripped a lot of gnome deps, especially everything gstreamer related stuff (xfce media player, cd burner and mixer are all gstreamer based). There are some gnome packages in the core and xorg modules (network manager, gnome keyring, dconf) so you'll have to pull and replace them too if you want to completely eliminate everything gnome.

I wasn't able to find a different gui partition editor (other than the kde one), which is why gparted is there. It takes about 1.5MB including deps) when stripped, which is why I have included it. You could search for something else or stick with CLI tools.

Keep in mind, for almost every gnome package I've included, I have searched for a lighter alternative and come back to the gnome package because I couldn't find a suitable alternative. Of course what is 'suitable' varies from person to person

[Rava]

for almost every gnome package I've included, I have searched for a lighter alternative and come back to the gnome package because I couldn't find a suitable alternative.

Now, that sounds like there is not a high change in me succeding with removing all og Gnome's dependencies...

Anyhow, congratulations to you for all the work in already trying to find the smallest packages for XFCe porteus already...

What with other XFCe based distros? Which way did they go? Do these distros use Gnome as well?

[Ahau]

It's certainly possible to remove more, you just have to look a little harder for alternatives, use command line tools for more activities, or use larger packages as replacements (for example I think you could drop network manager, gnome-keyring, libgnome-keyring, dconf, and maybe a few more, all in favor of wicd. However, wicd requires python, which is not gnome but is larger in size than all those other packages combined).

I'm not sure what all the other distros have done, but I'm sure most of them have as many or more gnome deps as Porteus-XFCE. That's the case certainly for Slackware, Vector, and Xubuntu. You might look at the Saluki variant of Puppy, I'm not sure how many gnome deps are there, but I know Puppy tries hard to stay small.