smallest possible installation size with gui?
 

i've search around and can't find anything that has this figure. what is the smallest installation size of fedora with a gui (i.e. - kde)? i'm only going to be using this linux box for running a distributed computing application (find-a-drug.org). that's it.

i'd also like to know if the installation is small enough to fit on a usb flash drive and would anyone recommend running linux on a usb flash drive 24/7? how easy/hard is it to install fedora on a usb flash drive (pen drive)?

thanks.

KDE is pretty big (~300mb?), you should try a small window manager instead like icewm or something. How big will this pendrive be? I've heard of 1gb ones. How are you planning to boot from this pendrive?

I think I once got an earlier version of redhat down to about 700MB or so ( But I wasn't trying for a smallest config ). Really, the easiest way to find out would be to just go through the install process where you get to install packages, then click off of everything, and only click on the things you'll need. If you need more, you have the disks and can just rpm -ivh them later.

Without GUI, I think in my RedHat class we were dealing with 125 to 300 MB worth of info.

If you aren't particularly attached to Fedora, you could probably build an installation from scratch or pare down one of the more customizable distibutions like Slackware; I wouldn't be able to give you an actual figure for that, but a decent minimal installation with a lightweight GUI would definitely fit in 100MB or so. If you do it from scratch, you can probably get it down to 4 or 5 MB using BusyBox, uClibc, TinyX, and a custom kernel.