Which includes the latest XFree86, and all tools needed to compile (GCC, Glibc, etc...), and Enlightenment (not necessary, but having this ensures that all the libraries needed for it have been compiled and work, in addition to ESD). I'd also like a browser, preferably Mozilla, but I suppose I could download that.

I wanted this in the first place, but I figured I'd try Slackware 8.1 (no-KDE/Gnome ISO), but I'm on 56k, but my resuming download manager, which resumed fine up through 200MB, suddenly decided to restart from 0 again, which really put me off from finishing.

There's a 'distro' called 2DiskXWindowsLinuxSystem that can be found here. I've never used it, but the name suggests that it's only 2.88Mb (after compression) and included rudimentary X. I am a fan of Super Rescue CD, but I can't remember their URL. Do a search... I know for a fact that I have mentioned it before on this site!

Try peanut linux. Base install can be around 55 megs.

Yeah, I tried Peanut Linux awhile back (version 9.3), but it didn't have a compiler. I downloaded the GCC RPM in the contribs section of Peanut's site, but it didn't work (it installed fine, but wouldn't work).

The 2-disk XWin thing looks nice, since they have GCC available as a package on their site for HD installs, but their XWindows is modified for space, which isn't good.

I think I may try BBC (bootable business card) Linux, and bootstrap a compiler from my Arch Linux 0.2 CD, which is bootable (another small ISO I downloaded, if you add them all together I may as well have downloaded one normal ISO).

Anyway, thanks for the replies, I may just download the 2-disk XWin + compiler and mess around with it a bit. The Peanut Linux route is also rather appealing, since I already have the entire ISO sitting right here on my PC, all I need is to find a way to get the compiler to work.

Also, a side question, why don't the linux distro programmers package their software in .tar.bz2, rather than .tar.gz? It'd make a sizable difference for us 56kers.

(Although they'd probably just add more software into the newly available space, filling it back up to 650-700MB again :^/ )

Not all .tar.bz2 files are smaller than their .tar.gz compatriots... just most of them (it depends on the contents as well as the compression algorithm).

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, with regard to the SRCD, it uses on-the-fly bzip2 compression, so it has around 1.2Gb(ish) of stuff on a standard 650Mb CD. I believe that you can also edit what files are present, and add your own. There's quite a bit of documentation, I just can't remember where.

I think that XFree86, gcc, etc are avaliable for http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/

Yeah, forgot to add, I searched for the Super Rescue CD and got sidetracked onto another site. Before that, all I found was a 12MB archive with scripts to create your own custom rescue CD.

I'll have to look into that, as well as Small Linux.

Has anyone tried Scrudgeware? ( http://scrudgeware.org/projects/The_Distro )

It looks fairly small, but the site doesn't offer a description of what is included...

superrescue is a 200mb iso

btw superrescue is http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/super...-1.3.1a.iso.gz file is 192MB

192MB for a rescue ISO. Meh. That brings up another question I have, why aren't all Linux ISOs gzipped/bzip2ed? I thought that it wouldn't make a difference, since everything inside the ISO is usually already compressed (.tar.gz), but I've seen a few gzipped ISOs...

My latest idea is to download ZipSlack (38.4MB), and then snag the XFree86 slackware packages. (Installing it to its own partition of course...)

The new superrescue 2.0 is 545MB

Ha, found it!

I thought it was on an old Linux Format DVD... and it was (issue 26). The ISO file is 685Mb in size, and the .link file shows http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/superrescue/v2/ . I don't know if it's been souped up or not though.

I'm trying Scrudgeware. I started to download ZipSlack, but decided I'd end up downloading so many extra packages for it, I might as well have downloaded the whole Slack ISO.

I'm still wondering why distro distributers don't gzip or bzip their ISOs, but I guess it doesn't matter, since Scrudgeware is, and that's the one I'm getting.

In other news, I found out I have a working LFS system on my hard drive that I forgot about, complete with XFree86 v4.2.0, Blackbox v0.65-alpha8 or thereabouts, XMMS, Mozilla, and other goodies. Oh well. It doesn't feel clean, since it has various error messages and programs that don't work, which I might be able to fix, however every time I think about it, I worry about screwing it up and having to go through all that compiling over again, whereas with an ISO, I can always reinstall.

Sounds like you need go with Debian:

It installs reliably from the Internet. It installs from several sites at once if I'm not mistaken. It does clean resumes from any catastrophic download or install failures. (as personally tested by me)

You can choose what you want from a huge software base, but to get the latest stuff, you have to go to the "unstable" branch, which is not really all that unstable. Their Apt-get and Dselect seems to work great once you figure them out.

Once the small base install gets installed, you can easily pick what you want on your system. Dependencies are handled automaticly, which isn't the case with Slackware, and without as much "dependency hell" that rpm distro's seem to cause.

You can then choose to save all your downloaded packages for archival purposes.

The only bad part is that I find Debian to have a steep learning curve, which I find much worse than Slackware (which Peanut is derived from).

======================

I've never tried to install a compiler on Peanut before. You might ask the author if there are some dependant packages you also need, since Slackware based distro's never check for this. Unless you found an old copy of Peanut, you've found that it has grown to be much bigger than it used to be. The tarball is over 100 megs now, probably requires about 400megs or so for the unpacked file system. I've drifted over to it's cousin Vector-Linux for this sort of thing, but it includes xfce instead of enlighenment as the lightweight WM choice, which is getting pretty nice too.

Let us know what you think of Scrudgeware, it looks kind of interesting.