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