Preamble: TINY's target is relatively small boxes but also people who are not computer scientists ad whose main motivation is not learning but doing some real work. This motivates for the install being relatively inflexible: the lesser questions the installations asks, the lesser the user will be confused. The way we envision future extensions would also be rigid but plug and play: ie if you want to install the Office suite, you just insert media and when finished you will find it works. Here are some improvements that could be added: 1) A better configurator for X and an integrated and fool proof X installation: it should not be possible for the user to not install the X server he needs. Here we could pick an existing X configuration tool but the install for X will need a major face lift, it would probably be easier to completely redesign it. 2) TINY needs a printer configurator. This is very important: remember TINY is for real work! 3) Three issues need to be investigated: installation from a Zip, from external CDROM readers and through a LAPLINK cable. Installation from a Zip needs reviewing what happens when all the installation is on single media instead of many small ones (like for a floppy installation) otherwise there is no real problem and after that it will be straightforward to allow installing from similar media types. Installing from CDROM will need to take into account that many computers in TINY's niche had old pre-IDE CD readers and in addition you had to deal with troublesome IRQs or memory ranges. IMHO we would probably be forced to move to a modular kernel (there are other reasons for doing so) but again this would require modifying the installation. 4) Since TINY aims to be a distribution for real work we need to build an office suite made of light-weight software. Last time we checked it Ted looked like it was we needed as Wysiwyg word processor but it was still rather buggy. Need to be rechecked. We could also investigate the use of XFCE as a more palatable alternative to mere use of Window manager. However here we have to consider how much additional memory that would need. 5) An old version of Netscape will fill the role of navigator. Unfortunately these old versions use a.out format and this means additional memory consumption. Since at that time Netscape did not read mail and news that means we would have to investigate what mail and news readers are available. We also need a program for easy configuration of PPP access (eznet and its xeznet pal seem good candidates). These components could form an Internet suite. 6) A way to save memory would be to rebuild X and disable support for features having little pratical use(*). Another way to save memory would be to rebuild the SVGA server and disable support for cards like the TNT2 who are obviously out of our niche. This would be needed and useful only as long as TINY stays with XFree 3. (*) Example: multihead support 7) Moving to SysV init sequence. The BSD init sequence used in Slackware is easier to understand by a human but it makes difficult both the automatic installation of sofware and writing a user-friendly tool for controlling what has to be started at boot time.