[HLUG] HLUG Open Disc for SFD

[Paul Stenning]

Hi all,

I have been sorting through the list we compiled at the last meeting, 
the latest OpenDisc from www.theopendisc.com plus Open Source Windows 
software that I use or am aware of and a bit of Googling to fill a 
couplke of gaps, and so far have the following to include on our CD-ROM:

7-Zip
Audacity (plus the LAME MP3 addon)
Avidemux
Blender
Celestia
Dia
DVD Flick
Eraser
FileZilla
Firefox
FreeMind
Gantt Project
GIMP (plus help files)
GnuCash
Httrack
InfraRecorder
Inkscape
KeePass
Kompozer
Notepadd++
OpenOffice
PDF Creator
Pidgin
Putty
QCad
Really Slick Screensavers
RSS Owl
Scribus
SnapBackup
Songbird
Stellarium
SumatraPDF
Thunderbird (plus Lightning add-on)
VLC
WampServer
WinMerge

Regarding ready-made Apache/PHP/MySQL packages for Windows, at the 
meeting someone suggested XAMPP.  However I had trouble getting this 
working properly a few months ago and found all the XAMPP branding on 
error pages etc annoying.  I use WampServer on my Windows XP PC for all 
my web development work and find it to be reliable and easy to 
configure.  Plus you can add in different versions of PHP, MySQL etc and 
switch between them.  So I intend to include WampServer and not XAMPP on 
the CD-ROM.

Paint.NET, although free for any purpose including commercial, is not 
Open Source and the source code is not available.  See www.getpaint.net 
for details.  For this reason we can't include it on our OpenDisc.  :(

The collection as above is 621MB.  If we estimate 20MB-30MB for the HTML 
front-end with a small screenshot of each program (I'm just going to 
have the index.html page launch in a browser) that still gives us 
50-60MB free (assuming 700MB CD-ROM).

Maybe we can put some educational programs in that space and not need a 
separate disc for that?  I have no idea what would be good to include or 
how big they are though.

The ones on OpenDisc are CaRMetal (Interactive geometry program), Guido 
van Robot (Introduction to programming for beginners) and Maxima 
(Computer algebra system) all of which sound somewhat obscure to me. 
There is also TuxPaint, TuxMath and TuxType in other sections.

If we need a bit more space we can always get rid of a couple of the 
more obscure programs like FreeMind (8.7MB), WampServer (16MB) and 
Eraser (9MB) or unnecessary bulky stuff like the GIMP help files 
installer (23MB).  Potentially we could have over 110MB free for 
educational programs.

I'd like to include PDF manuals for programs where these are available 
if there's space, but I'm not that bothered if not.  I haven't started 
looking for these yet.

Comments and suggestions for programs to include, exclude, change etc 
are welcome.  If we can get the program list finalised this week I can 
then work on the front-end and compiling the whole thing next weekend 
and hopefully have something to show at the meeting on the 8th September.

Cheers,
Paul