Comment 10 for bug 48355

Richard, it sounds like you're talking about the alternate install CD. On an install from the desktop CD (which is what this bug is about), 'apt-get clean' won't make a whole lot of difference. Furthermore, the desktop CD can't give you an option to install a reduced set of software; the desktop CD installer just copies over the live filesystem, and doesn't know how to copy just those bits associated with certain packages - in the general case this isn't possible, and even in very specific cases it's harder than you might think. It does remove itself and a few other packages from the installed system, but it does this by removing those packages after copying all the files over, which doesn't help on systems that don't have enough disk space to copy all the files in the first place.

I believe that the CD sleeve text is being changed in Feisty to say 3GB rather than 2GB.