I would like to make a Linux distro that goes on a floppy disk. All it would have is an ircd server. When the user puts it in their computer and runs it, it will configure itself and connect to a central ircd server. In theory, it would be a "P2P" IRC Network. People could put servers on, or shut them down. As long as the central database is online, the network would be up. When someone connects to the IRC network it will connect to the database server and choose the server with lowest ping. If a server goes down, the user connected is instantly reconnected to another server seamlessly. In theory, creating a reliable and distributed IRC network that anyone can host and be apart of. If anyone is interested in helping me please contact me here or at eric[at]ericbarch.com. Please let me know, I do not have much experience making distros and am looking for help. -Eric

well the server side is really quite standard, freenode.net, chatjunkies.org etc.. have a whole heap of round-robin DNS accessibile servers. but that's a very seperate thing to your client part. Personally i'd recommend avoiding floppy disks, as you're unliekly to get enough flexibility and space for it. you could use say, tomsrbt or wolf to maybe get online, but you'll struggle to get a usable irc client on too i'd guess. maybe a tiny cd distro would be better? like DamnSmallLinux, you can even use X then (but i assume that's quite irrelevant.)

in terms of making it work, i'd guess you'd just want to have the users shell be the irc client, preconfigured. should be really siple actualy.