I have polled my little mailing list, and received a few positive, and no negative responses, to the following proposed changes for 5.1. In brief:
- Reduction of X Windows platforms
Drop XFCE, Gnome, KDE. These integrated environments are too big for CD use, and impractically slow on DVD. Retain Fluxbox and the built-in fvwm and cwm window managers. Add scripted choice between window managers.
- Add hard disk (USB stick) images
Retain read/only iso9660 (cd9660) filesystems and "ramdisk" read/write filesystems so that the image may remain "clean" and have no private or encrypted information. Include a FAT32 MBR partition to share storage with other OSes, and management scripts to ease the mounting of this partition and other foreign filesystems on other drives.
- Add WiFi NIC connectivity
Scripted solution needed to eliminate the need for manual ifconfig/dhclient commands.
- Add xpdf, LibreOffice, mutt, and Thunderbird
Office automation for those who do not have or want browser-based services.
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This would take the configuration into a "production workstation" role, something it has never been before.