I have a 25Mhz 486SL laptop with 4MB RAM. I've tried a few distros, but they all need 8MB or so, so I'm kinda stuck at getting linux on this. I loaded the SmallLinux distro on it via ramdisk, but that's nuthin. BUT - it worked. So I thought about it a little, and had the idea to just build a linux system from complete scratch.

Would this be difficult to do?

My goal is for linux to load up, ask for a login, and get me to a shell. That's it for now. I figured if I installed a system that worked, I could expand on it. If I could get my NE2000-based NIC to run too, that would be fan-freakin-tastic cause then, I could easily work on the system, retrieving packages and stuff from the internet.

However, I have no idea where to start. I dunno about LFS, is that a good route? How can I put together a miniscule system like this?

Have a look at this

http://web.rsise.anu.edu.au/~okeefe/p2b/

Building a Minimal Linux System from Source Code

Wow! Great info! Thanks a lot, I'm at it now!

4MB-Laptop HOWTO

It's using an older version of Slackware. I've had success running this on a Compaq Contura 486/33mhz laptop with 8 MB of RAM, and a 270MB hard drive. The trick on the 4MB system is to initialize the swap partition, and make it available during the installation process. The HOWTO describes how to do that.

I actually had an NE2000 PCMCIA card running fine on that laptop-- too- It served me well, in fact-- I could use that machine to ssh into any of my other boxen. On top of that, I got Vim installed on it with syntax highlighting, so I could write little code snippets, and take fairly quick notes. All of this, and I still had about 110 MB of space left on the disc.