Arch Woof

I have added support for Arch Linux to Woof.

I have just done a test build, the desktop comes up, sound works, looks ok.

However, there is something wrong with the size. The live-CD ISO file is 106MB, whereas the Slackware build with basically the same selection of packages is 93MB. So, something quite large has got in there somehow -- a quick perusal of the files and I can't see what -- oh, one thing which is very odd...

The library file libgs.so.0.8.64 is 14MB, this is part of Ghostscript 8.64. Slackware and Ubuntu have version 8.63 and their lib file is only 6MB. The Arch library file is stripped. Why such an enormous difference in size? But, there has to be something else major to cause the large ISO file.

I see also that SVG image thumbnails are not displaying.

So, it needs work, but is basically functional.

Tonight I'll do a from-scratch Slackware build, to make sure that is still ok. I've been doing a lot of work on the scripts, need to check that the Slackware/Ubuntu/Debian builds are not broken.

---

Comments

SVG
Username: BarryK
I found out why the SVG thumbnails are displaying -- librsvg needs libcroco, the latter was missing.

libgs
Username: catwell
"A thread about that has been posted to Arch's forums: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=499999#p499999 I think I found the most important reason of the difference in size.

libgs size
Username: BarryK
"catwell, Thanks for letting us know about that. It's good that they have identified the problem. I see the comment that an Arch-based Puppy build would be bigger as they don't split their packages into 'dev', 'doc', etc. packages. However, Woof does that, totally automatically.

Tags: woof