I have a rather fast 64mb CF card that I would like to put a distro on it that will have my video driver, trident, and not vesa(which does not work) or fbdev and madwifi for wireless networking.
And a couple of basic tools like a full featured browser(Opera?), messaging client(Gaim/Pidgin) and a light word processing program(Abiword or smaller). Maybe XMMS on the side and nothing else.
I want it non-live because I will probably have to tweak it to get it to go on the picky video card. A couple megs left over on the filesystem would also be nice to save application settings and browsing history.
Let me know if there is anything that comes close. Video driver is the priority. DSL won't work for me on this machine due to lack of the video driver and won't fit onto 64mb CF as hard drive install.
Thanks in advance.

The 64mb is going to be the limiting factor. With the prices of flash cards so cheap (sub $20 for 1gb), why not just get a bigger card? I picked up a 4gb sandisk ultra III with usb adapter on sale last month for $24+tax. I have Fedora 9 persistent Live installed on it.

Puppy, knopperdisk.

See if you can customise Nimblex

How fast is the ultraIII? From what I read its not quite as fast as I would want it. What's your take on it?

I have a 4gb card but its so slow that I can't complete installs sometimes I give up after like 5-6 hours, since it won't be sane to run it like that afterwards. And yeah I'm not about to buy unbranded flash that never meets the claimed specifications. So once I can verify that I can get decent performance on the 64mb card I have which happens to be faster than the 4gb card, I will get me a 300x card.
Meanwhile the original question still stands.

My sandisk III is rated at 15MB/sec. While I have not tested its speed, it runs fine. I know the complete install did not take me more than 45 minutes and it was my first F9 install so a lot of that time was thinking. Remember the usb 2.0 spec is only 60 MByte/s and most card readers use USB.

I'm running a CF-IDE adapter, right now I'm eyeing newegg.com for something of 40mbps+ range.

*EDIT*
I like this, but shipping kind of kills it, I'm gonna look around and see if I find a better deal on this card. $20 total would be nice.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820208296

Be careful 40mbps != 40MB/sec.

Just for curiosity what is the huge concern with speed?

Edit: If you really need the speed, why not set up a raid0 array with several of these cards?

Uppercase... Right.
Well, it kind of makes sense to run the OS from a fast enough drive for quick boot/hibernation/resume. Since this is an ultralight notebook, I'm expecting on using it on the go where I won't have a couple spare hours for it to boot. I'm probably exaggerating but I want to at least match the performance of the 1.8" 4200RPM drive (same type iPods use) that this machine was originally intended for.

What you may have been seeing with the slower boot setups was a compatibility issue(particularly using an IDE adapter). The older flash units were not designed to act as a hard drive. That is why you will see:

from your link.

My sandisk F9 boots faster than my IDE F8.

Edit: I would also test out not hibernating(while using flash). I think you will find that the power saved will not be that significant(on a "modern" cpu).

Possibly, the 4gb card I have is unbranded, and probably has nothing to do with modern high capacity cards. I didn't buy it so I have no idea where it came from originally.

As for not hibernating, what are the alternatives? Linux has pretty much abandoned the idea of suspend to RAM (standby), and letting the system run inside a bag and overheat isn't such a good idea either.
I'm not exactly looking forward to doing a complete shutdown and boot cycle every time. I also understand that to hibernate the system writes a complete image of RAM the size of it, in this case its either 240 or 496MB.
The CPU is a low voltage P3 750MHz, and no other drives other than HD.

With that old of cpu you will pretty much have to hibernate or shut down. The newer cpus can slow down/stop enough that they do not generate any significant amount of heat or power.

That's incorrect. If you are speaking of SpeedStep, this one does it rather well, except I haven't seen it run slower than 318MHz. Of course you won't expect that out of some P3, which many consider prehistoric, but the fact is, Portege 2000 is a piece of technological art, putting the new EeePC to shame. The CPU fan has been on only like 2 times while I've had this laptop, but I've never been crazy enough to put it inside a bag while it's on where there is no ambient ventilation. The fact is, there is no way I'm going to walk around all day with the machine turned on. Even the 4.5 hour battery life won't be of help here.
I'm gonna give Ubuntu 7.04 a shot, since that's the only configuration I've seen where suspend to RAM works, at least on some machines.