This post will summarize the changes in Xubuntu development and community in the past months

A change in policy resulted in the inclusion of useful GNOME and Ubuntu apps and removing less mature or unmaintained lighter ones.

Our original rules for no libgnome-using apps were meant to keep the distro light. The hope held two years ago that viable GTK-only alternatives for Ubuntu apps would emerge and mature faded. Projects under the Xfce umbrella and to a certain extent Xfce itself are stagnating or moving very slowly, so we had to eventually pick the less lightweight apps because they were more user friendly and less buggy.

Another change that made our continual duplication of efforts even less worthwhile was the resource increase of the Ubuntu base system and of the other apps not directly under Xubuntu control but still included in the distro: python scripts for HP being started by default and firefox being what it is when it comes to memory consumption are two examples.

While not high on most of GNOME developers' agenda, some are working on or are open to patches slimming down their apps and getting rid of libgnome and the ~25 .so-s that it depends on. Incidentally during Gutsy I sent no patch to Xfce upstream but sent a few to GNOME and will probably keep it this way. Avoiding duplication is a good thing when possible, and the only really non-replaceable and good quality apps in Xubuntu are the components of the core Xfce desktop. Everything else is fair game for changing.

The list of Gutsy changes in the Xubuntu default install are: the addition of network-manager, update notifier, displayconfig-gtk, replacing xarchiver, xfburn, gxine and xscreensaver with file-roller, brasero, totem-xine and gnome-screensaver. We also added gnome-games :)

Regarding installation from liveCD, during the past cycles that become impossible on machines with less than 192M RAM. The new (hidden, not in the boot menu) "only-ubiquity" kernel parameter on the Ubuntu liveCDs may help, since it does not start a full desktop opnly the installer.

* On the community side

Lionel Le Folgoc became the most active packager and bugfixer, taking care of the inclusion of Xfce 4.4.1 and many other packages

I did mostly upstream gnome work, some parts of which made it into gutsy, and packaging and bugfixing stuff with the release looming near. This is my last Xubuntu cycle, I am going to take a break from it, seems in good shape, and I have a lot less time these days.

Luzi Thöny did most of the documentation and updated the desktop guide for 7.10

Jozsef Mak took care of the artwork as usual, this time it was done very early in the cycle

Jérôme Guelfucci and others contributed a lot to bug triaging

the Mythbuntu project is now based on Xfce/Xubuntu - this means more exposure and developers for the same set of packages. Hopefully Mario Limonciello and his team will help Xubuntu as well, even if indirectly :)

In the footnotes of a recent post Luis Villa says

"fedora makes it very easy to turn a liveCD iso into a USB key (one command line); Ubuntu’s equivalent process is poorly documented and awkward, which is why I haven’t bothered to test a new Ubuntu Tribe as well"

I also found non-VM testing of CD images more convenient when writing them to a 1GB USB stick compared to burning to an actual CD. It's faster to create, does not waste blanks or wear out CDRW-s and it is noticeably faster to boot (no slow seeks in flash memory).

I modified the Fedora script to work with the Ubuntu liveCD layout and put it here

You'll need to run it on an unmounted vfat formatted partition, for ex:
$ sudo ./isotostick.sh /path/to/image.iso /dev/sdb1

It should work on all ubuntu variants since they use the same liveCD layout.