UDS Wednesday kicked off with a super interesting session; a meeting entitled “Application selection in the default install“.
Over three posts I’ll present the main ideas and discussions from these meetings: Whittling the default
game selection down, removing GIMP from default
installs & what best to use for photo-editing and the decision to potentially include PiTiVi as a default application in
Lucid Lynx…
Remember that nothing is final and decisions may change over the course of the development cycle.
Gnome Games
“ Game selection. Can we choose fewer, better games by default, especially ones that include a social component?”
This was the ‘topic’ for the first part of the sessions. Not much to report other than: –
- gBrainy, Solitaire and Sudoku to most certainly be included by default
- Gnome-Games meta package to be removed and ‘single’ games from it installed instead.
- Tetris highly desired to stay installed by default
- Talk of installing ‘on-line games’ as menu entries. Idea soon nixed.
- Frozen Bubble was a game a lot wanted installed but it will take up too much space on the Ubuntu CD.
- Gnome-Games re-written in clutter were proposed, but some hardware has issues with clutter meaning this isn’t the best move.
- “Mines” will certainly no-longer appear; the game is decidedly “windows 95” and out-dated.
- Other games suggested (but not decided on) include Atomix, Hearts and various others from the Gnome Games selection.
The biggest factor in choosing (or not choosing) games is based on
their size. An Ubuntu LiveCD has to fit on a 700mb CD and room is at a
premium.
Social side of the coin
A lot of talk was centered around the idea of making games “social”;
creating or adding mulit-player elements, preferably over
telepathy/empathy. After all – who wouldn’t love to challenge their
friends to a game of Chess or Tetris in Ubuntu?!
Despite many games having multilayer elements, the aim is to hopefully transition these to use the telepathy framework.
Two games were singled out for this: Chess and Sudoku. Tetrinet was also mooted, as you can’t have a games selection without some form of Tetris!
No formal or final decision has yet been agreed on, and we’ll likely
see a bit of back-and-forth with some games over the course of the
Lucid development cycle.
With that said, the idea to reduce the number of games – and offer a
more interesting variety of games – is a sound one. How many of you
play every game installed? I certainly don’t. In fact they’re one of the first things i remove on a default install.
I’m please the “one-package” install of 10 gnome-games is being split
up. Not everyone wants 3 or 4 card games installed; it was frustrating
to those who just wanted one or two gnome-games but had no choice but
to have all 10 installed.