I have this project going where I want to have a ton of tiny Virtual Machines running in a simulated network on a single host computer. The various virtual machines will serve a broad variety of purposes, but they will all be very small virtual machines (low-memory, no X11) and will usually only have one or two additional applications installed on each of them aside from the base system.

So, what I want is a super-lightweight Linux distro that provides only a simple base system (no package management needed, or even compiling tools) which I can clone and modify slightly for each machine's purpose.

ttylinux seemed like a promising option. The downside I found, though, is that the ttylinux install uses ext2, so every time a system shuts down improperly, I end up losing 10+ files to lost+found.

You could rebuild the kernel of ttylinux to include ext3 or ext4 support. Or look at others such as tiny core Linux. You might want to look in the distrowatch website. It is a good place to discover different distributions. Also consider removing packages from one of these to reduce the size of your virtual image even further. Also look inside an initrd file. Before the root file system is mounted, Linux is running off of a minimal version in memory. If this system is enough for your purposes, a light weight kernel & the system from an initrd file used as your mini distribution may be enough for your image.

try Pipsqueak its made off ttylinux and has ext4 support
http://geekinsnthings.homelinux.com:4444/pipsqueak

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Syste...ak-58214.shtml

You can try Microcore Linux, it's Tinycore Linux without X.

You could make what you want from sources. Compile in only the support you need. It would really be the best. Add in busybox maybe for simple commands.

Tom's boot disk or other floppy may work.

Could even use a bsd base. See g4u.

Maybe tiny slitaz. I think you will like it.

Any newer kernel ought to support ext3 if you use I think the -j option. ttylinux should support at least ext3.

Tomsrtbt is the meanest distro I know. There's also linuxfromscratch.