I just bought a used Asus Eee mini-netbook 4G Surf off ebay. It had Xandros OS and 512 MB of RAM. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB and installed Zorin OS 6 Lite on the 4 GB SSD drive. Zorin is good, but it is quickly filling up my 4 GB of space every time it updates.

I was hoping that since it has an SSD drive that it would be lightening fast...or close to it (having ~ a 10 second boot or less). Is that possible? Is there a version of Linux that can boot that fast and take up a small amount of space on a SSD or SD drive (it can boot off an SD card)?

Not all SSDs are the same, the SSD in that netbook is not faster than an mechanical device (rather slower, from my experience).
If you want a really fast experience I would recommend something that runs from RAM, like Puppy, Slitaz or Tinycore. Those are really small (Tinycore starts with 10MB, but you have to add applications, Slitaz is about 30 MB (base system with some applications) and Puppy is about 100-120MB) and very fast even on older machines.

I personally had a customized Slackware on that machine, running wmii as WM. Was fast enough to read some Ebooks and surf the net (without Flash), but I replaced it with a netbook with faster CPU.

Then either quit updating or start jumping through hoops to clear out space. Other option is to run Zorin off of class 10 8gig to 16gig external SD flash card and use internal 4gig SSD as storage.

With 2 gig of ram. MacPup 528 runs good as a frugal install on a pendrive I have on my eeepc 701SD (8gig SSD model). I've been running AntiX on internal SSD on it OK also but I have more room than you do. On my EEEpc 900 with dual drive SSD. 4gig/16gig. I have "/" installed to 4gig SSD, with "/home" installed and symlinked and edited /etc/fstab to secondary 16gig ssd. I have to work at removing cruft and stuff after a apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade to clean out my 4gig internal SSD. Best I can do lately is keep things as 3.1 gig of space being taken up . I even have static browser installs in "/home" plus other static installs in /home trying to keep installs space to a minimum in "/".

http://antix.freeforums.org/antix-11...hed-t3104.html

Tiny core Linux may be another option also for you. Saluki Puppy which is in development plus many other variants of Puppy Linux as a frugal install may be another as well as a Slackware or Crux Linux minimal install. You will need to translate to English in your browser for the Slackware Live.

http://linux.exton.net/node/879

http://cruxex.exton.net/

Edit: Oh yeah. If wanting a cloud based fast booting OS. I quit trying it though myself (personal preference)
http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

Take a peek at slitaz maybe.

Xpud has been the fastest boot that I have tested. It is a rather limited distro though.

Thanks for all the tips. I know better what to look for...I may try doing SD card installs rather than my slow SSD. I had heard of puppy and slackware but not the others. I have a bunch of things to try now!

I now have a mini-netbook that is super fast. I did a full install of Slacko-Puppy on my 4 GB SSD. Then I bought a 16 GB class 10 SDHC and put the 486 iso of antiX-M11 on it using an ext4 filesystem. To get the iso to put I had to put a special menu.1st file entry into Puppy's GRUB:

title antiX
kernel (hd1,0)/antix/vmlinuz vga=785 fromhd=/dev/sdb1 fromiso=/antix/antiX-M11-486.iso en xres=1024x768
initrd (hd1,0)/antix/initrd.gz
boot

I also made my 4 GB SSD ext2 and have no swap partition. I have 2 GB of RAM, so this is never a problem. I read that a swap partition on an SSD decreases how long it will last and an ext2 partition was recommended.