Various suggestions and two minor bugs

[py-thon]

My suggestions for Sparky (some I already mentioned in my installation post):

1. mate-netbook
Exclude mate-netbook from Live-DVD. For those who don't know the package: mate-netbook cuts off the headline from all windows (after a short delay, I don't remember whether this is only triggered with maximised windows). This adds valuable height to netbooks (maybe 25 pixels out of a total 600). As far as I know mate-netbook can't be configured. You install it and it is on, you remove it and it is off.
I suppose that most people installing Sparky won't be netbook-users. In the Live-DVD and standard installation procedure it is probably confusing for people who don't know about mate-netbook. They might think something's wrong. For netbook-users it is no problem to install mate-netbook after the main installation (one small package).

2. Panel
Add a "show desktop"-icon to the panel. Everyone I know uses it a lot.

3. Menu
Substitute Mate's menu for mintmenu. Mate's menu consumes more space in the panel, is slower (first part opens quickly but second is slow) and is in my opinion less user-friendly. But it might be that just because using mintmenu for several years I became accustomed to it.
On the other hand mintmenu consumes 24 MB of RAM (im my opinion it's worth it and those with little RAM will choose Sparky with another DE). I forgot to look, but probably Mate's menu is more efficient in this respect.

4. Sparky APTus
I think it would be useful to show in "Update and Upgrade" the date of or the time expired since the last update (age of package list). So you immediately know whether it makes sense to run update before upgrade or not. I don't know where but I suppose the date is saved somewhere, so it could be easily shown.

5. Installer
The installer at some point (in the informational background of its window) mentions Evince (belonging to Cinnamon), but Mate uses Atril.

6. Synaptic
For some reason Synaptic after the installation shows a history (which gets the data from /root/.synaptic/log) back to September 2012 (probably of the creator of the Live-DVD). The old history should be deleted before creating the DVD so as to only show the history after installation date.
At least under certain circumstances (it happened to me on my first two installation trials) Synaptic after the installation still shows the history of an installation that existed before, in my case going back to April 2012 (current and old histories are joined). As I formatted all partitions during installation process I suppose that synaptic reads the history from HDD when starting the live system and writes it back to HDD when creating the new system (after partitioning).