A few ideas ( I can't sleep and few ideas popped up)

I agree with you rodw.

I think earlier on I mentioned what I deleted.

Playing around with another iso

As per tommy:
Just to head it off, Linux mint 64 bit with Mate, preempt rt, linuxcnc, librecad, blenderCam, inkscape, geany, nativecam, dxf2gcode, dmap2gcode

Nativecam & Blendercam I put in the "too hard basket" for now.

Hmmmm no response from Her Majesty yet...interesting

I'd also cull LibreCad as its only going to appeal to a limited subset of users (I'm not one of them). Onshape is cloud based, full parametric 3D, runs on any platform in your browser and your phone and is free if your project is kept as open source (Isn't what this is all about?), so why would you bother with 2D tools? We are way past that point today. This is CNC so leave CAD out of it.

Same for Inkscape. This is CNC, not graphic design.

Whilst I love Geany, if Gedit is native to Mint, then stick to it as it does the job.

So that leaves your gcode tools. Part of me says to ditch them too. I've never used them and am not likely to either.

The purer the ISO is, the more chance it has of being adopted by the dev team and that is the direction we should take.

rodw wrote:

I'd also cull LibreCad as its only going to appeal to a limited subset of users (I'm not one of them). Onshape is cloud based, full parametric 3D, runs on any platform in your browser and your phone and is free if your project is kept as open source (Isn't what this is all about?), so why would you bother with 2D tools? We are way past that point today. This is CNC so leave CAD out of it.

Same for Inkscape. This is CNC, not graphic design.

Whilst I love Geany, if Gedit is native to Mint, then stick to it as it does the job.

So that leaves your gcode tools. Part of me says to ditch them too. I've never used them and am not likely to either.

The purer the ISO is, the more chance it has of being adopted by the dev team and that is the direction we should take.

I agree with what you've said.

To cut down on size I've taken out:
Gimp, Simple-scan, Pix
Hex-chat, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Transmission
Libreoffice
xplayer (Media Player), Rhythm-box, Brasero

Maybe a few others such as CUPS. I've actually toyed with idea of not compiling the kernel with sound support.

So far all I've added is midnight commander (on the rare occassions the GUI doesn't come up it's a great tool for file management and the editor is quite good as well), would ssh be a worthwhile addition ?

I also find gftp great for transferring files via ssh. Any comments on that ?

Geany is in the repos so that's not an issue. Actually I like to work on some syntax hight lighting for LCNC ini & hal files for geany.
It could also be setup for compiling custom hal components for those that have a bent that way.

The way the iso is respun, JLiveCD extracts the files from your base iso, unpacks the squashfs file, drops you into a chrooted environment where you can add & delete packages as you see fit, setup the way you want the desktop. You can run GUI apps that are installed in the chroot, the only thing that I haven't tried, and this maybe a bit sketchy, is to run a whole desktop.
After that is done, it does it's housekeeping, asks if you want a new initramfs (if you have installed a new kernel), repacks the squashfs file and rebuilds a iso.
Any new packages that are downloaded are saved via JLiveCD into a holding directory and during the setup of the chroot environment the are copied to the cache. So if you remove a package, make your iso and want it back you don't have to download the package again.

Gimp should stay as we've used it to annotate screendumps from halscope.
hexchat is used to talk on the Linuxcnc IRC channel.
I have used LibreOffice to manipulate CSV files.
I think I've downloaded Word files and had to read them.
I thought some LinuxCNC GUI's use sound
CUPS should stay. My network printers are installed on my LinuxCNC device
Wouldn't some people need Brasero if they wanted to create an ISO backup? I think its also part of the desktop environment.

I'm just one user so I'm sure others would uses some other features.

There could be an argument to leave stuff out if we had to get down to a specific size for CD or DVD .iso burning but all my installs have been from a thumb drive.

I think I saw the other day the new version of Mint requires 16gb of storage so the days of putting it on an 8 gb SSD module might be over.

Hmmmm so what you really want, despite previous comments, would be a standard Mint desktop install with LCNC and a RT kernel replacing the standard one.

Where I was thinking of a more "mean & lean" install.

If that's the case just a repo with Mint specific packages sounds like an easier option. And forget remastering Mint all together.

I think we still need the ISO. How else are we going to get PREEMPT_RT or perhaps RTAI? It seems like PREEMPT_RT is winning that argument today. The requirement for a Real Time environment is what drove LinuxCNC to distribute via an ISO in the first place.

Its good to have the discussion but what I think its shown that different people want different bits of the standard deployment so leaving stuff out is probably going to inconvenience some when we want to make it as seamless as possible to adopt LinuxCNC (and as a secondary goal, let them sample Linux as Mint does it). We don't really want to deviate from that.

In this day and age SSD storage is cheap and having these extra apps deployed is not going to impact on latency so why worry too much about that?

I've got a PC here I can wipe to test the PREEMPT_RT ISO.... Its a Gigabyte Brix USFF so it has all sorts of modern hardware unsupported on Wheezy or Stretch.

It may even be easier for a meta package.

1. User adds the repo (many packages have ppa's to delivery software Kicad is an example)

2. User does an apt-get update

3. User does an apt-get install name-of-meta-package

4. Everything needed is installed and the user reboots into his brand new shiney LCNC RT system.

The only drawback is not being able to test with a live cd. But on the other hand if the user has a existing Mint system installed it's easy enough to do.

I could throw an ISO together for you to test, but I'd have to post it on physical media as I can only get 1.5Mb/s (yes bits per second download, and my connection is a bit flakey this week). No I'm not in rural NSW, just a part of Sydney where the NBN is running at 12 months, best estimate, behind schedule.

Hmm, Sounds like you won't want to know that I am on the NBN with fibre to the house and a 100/40 Mb link....

I don't understand meta packages.

Happy to receive snail mail contributions. Give me a couple of weeks as I have revised my freight arrangements today so when that goes live, I'll have overnight rates Australia wide but I'm not sure if that will apply to incoming freight or just outgoing.