When we have safe and stable ways of doing it "manually", it may be automated more. May have to do some adaptations to the package structure to make it efficient, though. For example, some crucial Knoppix packages are not apt-downloadable, had a few of them purged by aptitude yesterday wthout me asking for it.

I got down to about 1660 packages by systematic, mostly group-wise purging of 7.0.2 DVD. Will see how much space they will take up when remastered, but I doubt there is very much use in going for a very low basic package count for the graphics version. Another alternative could be to use the package selection in business card version of ordinary Debian 6.0X.

I will try to carry out this purging running Knoppix in a virtual machine next time. Qemu-kvm is quite nice when we are friends and I don't try too hard to direct its workings. But don't use qemu without kvm, way too slow for realistic use!