The live cd has a very hard time shrinking below 700M, and it is not
going to get better when it switches to use a dracut initrd.
One way to make sufficient room on the live cd would be to drop Gimp.
This has been proposed independently, on the grounds that it is not a
very good fit for the live cd audience anyway (where we probably at most
need the occasional photo touch ups), and its UI is somewhat
unconventional.
There is probably not going to be any alternative to this step, due to
the hard size limits, but I'd like to give people a chance to comment
first, anyway. So, comments ?
Matthias