Comment 12 for bug 1028453

Here's a brief analysis of the extra packages installed on top of the squashfs contents, organised in groups of which ones are installed together by d-i followed by the reported additional installed-size for each group:

linux-headers-3.5.0-14
linux-headers-3.5.0-14-generic
linux-headers-generic
linux-headers-virtual
linux-image-3.5.0-14-generic
linux-image-virtual
linux-virtual
(101MB)

libpci3
pciutils
(270KB)

libusb-1.0-0
usbutils
(259KB)

biosdevname
(22KB)

apt-xapian-index
aptitude
aptitude-common
dmidecode
laptop-detect
libboost-iostreams1.49.0
libclass-accessor-perl
libclass-isa-perl
libcwidget3
libept1.4.12
libgdbm3
libio-string-perl
libparse-debianchangelog-perl
libsigc++-2.0-0c2a
libsub-name-perl
libswitch-perl
libtimedate-perl
libxapian22
perl
perl-modules
python-apt
python-apt-common
python-chardet
python-debian
python-six
python-xapian
tasksel
tasksel-data
xz-utils
(50MB - possibly closer to 65MB following change in livecd-rootfs 2.87, since now this will pull in iso-codes too)

installation-report
(77KB)

language-pack-en
language-pack-en-base
(4MB)

gettext-base
grub-common
libasprintf0c2
libfreetype6
libfuse2
os-prober
(7MB)

grub-gfxpayload-lists
grub-pc
grub-pc-bin
grub2-common
(2.6MB)

With the exception of kernel headers which you've already said you want to keep, most of this is small enough that it isn't worth talking about. However, tasksel and its dependencies take up a noticeable amount of space considering that we configure tasksel not to do anything during installation in the minimalvm case. Do you want to keep this? I'm reluctant to take the decision to remove this myself, because you may well have documentation that says "install minimalvm and then run tasksel to turn the system into whatever you want", given that a minimal virtual machine isn't very useful on its own. Anyone from the server team want to weigh in on this?