I appriciate that support for customized and remastered KNOPPIX exists. I am amazed to be able to alter this distribution to make it suitable for other environments. My only problem is how difficult it is to figure out what packages can be removed and what has to remain to keep base functionality.

The remasters like morphix, dsl, and others tend to be out of date from the latest KNOPPIX release. So far I have found only KNOPPIX 3.6 will drive a Dell D600 because of its network card. Also, the other remasters package lists seem to not mention all the packages or maybe there were different packages for the release of KNOPPIX they are based on compared to the release of KNOPPIX I have been trying to work with.

I was thinking how much benefit there would be if when a new release of [full] KNOPPIX was made available, there was also released an iso of the base packages of that version. Only the packages that make the iso KNOPPIX. No paint, desktop, graphic, or anything else. Only the boot, kernel, modules, shell, package configuration utilities (and the part I apperently don't know about but keep losing and breaking my remaster).

Then, existing customizations could update their versions more regularly by just adding their package lists to the base. Next version of KNOPPIX comes out, slap the packages on and go to town. New customizers have a well defined starting point to create from. The whole usability factor of KNOPPIX derivitives and their creation and maintainence goes up. And, it would get me out of the hole I've created for myself where I seem to have become expert at breaking KNOPPIX in new ways on a daily basis.