List of apps with each spin

[Pinback]

noobie q and prob been asked before ... however, i can't find it - even with google!
where are the lists of what apps are supplied with each spin please?

[nsnbm]

Hello Pinback,
This may not be a very practical idea for you, but if you download a spin, such as the fedora 17 installation dvd, or get hold of one, and look at the Packages directory, you will find the apps that are supplied with the distribution in that directory. Other than that, you could simply look at the repositories of the distribution which include all the standard available apps (which greatly exceed what is on the installation dvd) with the understanding that if you install the distribution, all of those apps which are in the standard repository are available to you, plus, you could then look at other repositories which also provide apps for the distribution such as rpmfusion in the case of fedora. Beyond that, there are apps which come only as compressed packages in tar.gz or tar.bz2 formats which can also be installed, which makes the apps horizon rather large. And there's more as well, like the ability to run apps from non-linux distributions on linux using emulation and virtualization programs. It just about never ends really. Ben.

[Pinback]

cheers nsnbm.
it was really just to see what would initially be "there" after a live boot and/or initial install.

i ask because i made the mistake of putting the X version of that "other" distro on my system because i wanted a no-frills de. however, i hated the apps that it came with and getting rid of those and replacing them with the one's that would come as standard with the main version of that same distro proved to be a marathon ... or snickers if you're not as old as me.
that's what has started me on a quest to re-look at what else is available.

[nsnbm]

Hello Pinback,

I'm not sure I understood everything you have mentioned, but in relation to "no frills" desktops, it does depend on what "frills" means to each individual. Personally, when I began with fedora's predecessor, red hat, I installed the standard installation and learnt about linux by playing around and communicating with those who knew more. Then I went through a phase of minimalism where I wanted to have on my computer just what I used and no more, as if I didn't want to have "useless" stuff hanging around taking up space on my hard-disk. But as I grew with linux knowledge, I found that programs, or apps, that I had previously not installed, did become necessary for me to install to accomplish more computing tasks. Recently, and for quite a few years now, especially since hard-disk sizes have increased heaps, I simply install the whole distribution and so get everything that is on the installation disk, even though I know I'm not going to use most of it soon, if at all. But occasionally, I found that I did start to use some apps here and there which I would not have predicted at the time of initial installation, and I was glad that they were on my hard-disk and that I didn't have to go and install them separately. In fact I use a lot of apps that don't come with the install disk, so I install them immediately after the installation is done. I suppose what I'm saying here is that I have the best result for my computing needs when I install more rather than less.

Now, in relation to the desktop environment, mine is absoutely minimal even though I have Gnome and Kde and the others installed. So my installation is "maximal" but the desktop is minimal. I don't start up these desktop environments, though I use some of the applications that come with them from time to time. I start in runlevel 3, which is a pretty minimal startup (to a single console), and then I start X and run a window manager with no images at all, which is far short of a desktop environment with its menus and thumbnails and root window wallpaper. Sometimes I like to play a Kde game, so I can do so easily because the app is there already installed, but I don't need the Kde desktop environment to be running to do that. Other times I might run a gnome app, like gnome-calculator, and it's there because I have Gnome installed, but no Gnome desktop environment running. Apps can be run from a terminal, or an xterm if they depend on X, so the user doesn't need a menu system if they know the command to start an app. So, I guess that what I'm saying here is that minimal desktop doesn't need or depend on a minimal installation.

I hope these comments are relevant to your subject of interest, but as I have implied, there are a multitude of possibilities available on the matter of what to install and what is available. ben.