[HLUG] HLUG Open Disc for SFD

Mon Aug 30 20:57:45 UTC 2010

I had a quick play with Stellarium and Celestia and couldn't really get 
to grips with either of them, though Stellarium seemed to be a bit more 
user-friendly.  Celestia is 35MB and Stellarium is 43MB so getting rid 
of one or the other (or both) would free up some space.  Would someone 
like to comment as to which if either to keep?

It's debatable how educational some of the extra stuff on the 
educational OpenDisc is.

It's also interesting how out of date some of the programs are. 
GraphCalc hasn't been updated since 2003, and Abakt since 2006 (and the 
website is now gone no no source code either).

Thoughts and suggestions for programs, especially in the educational 
area, are welcomed.

Jools and some others probably won't be happy that I'm doing the HTML in 
DreamWeaver and not Kompozer, but once it's on the disc nobody would 
know!  It's what I'm familiar with and I don't have much tome to work on 
it. ;)

Paul

On 30/08/2010 21:30, info at lifespacedesign.co.uk wrote:
> Paul,
>
> That just about covers the territory ! Excellent work.
>
> The contents of the Open Education Disc are listed at
>
> http://www.theopendisc.com/education/
>
> With what looks like more music/ multi-media and science teaching focus in
> addition to the usual stuff you have already listed.
>
> Tuxpaint as a possible addition? Also two astronomy apps? - I don't use either,
> so I can't say how redundant that is, nor how much space would be made by
> dropping one. Your call !
>
> If in doubt throw in some OS fonts ! Jools is nagging me for using proprietory
> ones... :-(
>
> Nice one,
> Pete
> On 30 August 2010 at 20:12 Paul Stenning<paul at sp-tech.co.uk>  wrote:
>
>> 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.It's a deeply considerate thought, but could it be just
>> known good hyperlinks to downloads?
>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
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