Remastering a Light "New User" Knoppix??

[lagagnon]

Hello everyone. I volunteer for a small charity - we recycle, refurbish and repair 3-8 year old computers to donate to the disadvantaged in the small city where I live. Presently we load MS Windows 98SE but will soon be switching to Linux. I have researched quite a number of "lightweight" distros to use, but in the end could not find one that fits the bill in all respects. Remastering Knoppix to what we want really appeals.

The boxes we donate are usually P200-P800, >=128MB RAM, about 5GB HD space, 8-40x CDROM, NIC, sound card, sometimes a modem. Our clients are usually computer novices, and often not educated beyond high school. Consequently, the user interface needs to be foolproof.

KDE or Gnome are out of the question on these older boxes. IceWM really appeals as it can be made to look very much like MS Windows which folks are familiar with but I don't like the fact that the menus are not automatically updated with the loading/removal of new software and is not easily configurable. xfce is probably what we will go with. We plan on removing some of the heavier weight apps and replacing with lighterweight stuff, but then we also want to load other things.

My questions are:

1) I have been reading the remastering HOWTO's. One thing is not yet clear: in the remastering process can you actually be within the new loaded desktop environment (eg xfce4) making desktop changes that will be eventually imaged, or do you need to edit the appropriate xfce config files by hand??

2) what heavy applications/libraries can we delete that would not affect a user who will not be doing any development/programming and not using anything except English? For example any internationalization stuff we can remove and any other suggestions appreciated.

3) what is the easy way to remove all KDE components?

cheers....Larry

[firnsy]

First of all I'm giving a big thumbs up to your efforts, and the work you're doing ... there just aren't enough people like you and the people you volunteer with.

Now to tackle your questions one at a time:

1) I have been reading the remastering HOWTO's. One thing is not yet clear: in the remastering process can you actually be within the new loaded desktop environment (eg xfce4) making desktop changes that will be eventually imaged, or do you need to edit the appropriate xfce config files by hand??

You sure can, just do a search for UnderScore's HOWTO , and you will be interested in the start of the last half section where he runs X from with in the chrooted environment.

2) what heavy applications/libraries can we delete that would not affect a user who will not be doing any development/programming and not using anything except English? For example any internationalization stuff we can remove and any other suggestions appreciated.

Some ideas are for you are:
1. dpkg -l | grep i18n # Display all internationalisation packages most of which you can remove.
2. You can remove the man pages, not a real necessity for people who are using computers for internet.
3. Write down what you want to provide them, identify what applications will achieve that, remove the rest (except system stuff, apt-get will normally tell you)
4. deborphan is your friend

3) what is the easy way to remove all KDE components?

The quick and dirty way is: "apt-get remove kde-libs", just take a not of what it is going to uninstall just in case you need to put one or two back.

Just for your benefit remastering is an iterative process, you remove one or two, test it out if ain't broke remove one or two more. If you don't rush it, it can be a very painless process.

Goodluck[/url]

[markpreston]

Hi,
I'm all for remastering Knoppix, but have you considered
Damn Small Linux, a.k.a. DSL?
See
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

This uses FluxBox Windows manager and would appear to me to give you most of what you want.
At my local LUG a couple of months ago we installed DSL on a box with a 1GB hard drive and the person went away with a faster running machine with 950 Mb of space left on the hard drive. When they came in they had 50 Mb left following a base install of another Linux distro.
Regards,
Mark