I am planning on creating a family-oriented remaster of Knoppix, optimized the average home and family PC.

This means keeping and emphasizing the easiest, flashiest and most useful home applications, such as KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and XMMS. At the same time, it means removing geek-only stuff like Apache and the various networking and programming tools.

This is an important and even essential project because right now, the biggest complaint against Knoppix for use as a home OS is that is too unwieldy. Having 15 different text editors doesn’t add any value to a home OS; it just makes things unnecessarily complicated. This isn’t a knock against Knoppix, which after all wasn’t designed to compete in the home OS market. However, having a “home Knoppix” project would be great for the Knoppix community, as it would be a great way to make Knoppix more mainstream and give it some exposure.

My question for forum members is therefore the following: Knoppix has over a thousand packages… which geek-only packages can we removed without breaking the distro? This isn’t as easy to answer as it sounds, since the majority of packages have pretty confusing descriptions (ex: arpwatch - Ethernet/FDDI station activity monitor.)

If someone gives me a list of packages that can be removed, I will remaster the ISO without these packages. I will make it available to everyone on my FTP site, so you can burn a copy for you’re your girlfriend and even your grandmother!