Hi,
I wonder if there's an easy way to strip down an installation to the bare minimum, e. g. the packages you get when you select "minimum installation".
In Slackware, the bone-headed package manager slackpkg has a few nice options, among which 'slackpkg clean-system', which removes all third-party packages in one single operation, or 'slackpkg remove <package_group>', which does exactly that.
I know CentOS has yum groupinstall/groupremove etc. but as far as I can tell, if I only have a handful of packages from a package group installed, yum grouplist lists the group as not installed, so there's not an easy way to tell.
You may wonder why I want to do this. I have CentOS installed on some sandbox machines here, and I like to fiddle with different desktops and setups just for the sake of experimenting.
Cheers,
Niki