lol that's a classic misunderstanding. I never said that I wanted an OS that would fit into just 4MB of RAM. In fact you even quoted the part where I said that the memory footprint is of lesser importance ;) All I asked for was a version that would just provide all necessities to run command line tools without any other waste of RAM and that could address 4GB of RAM. I'm fine with everything that stays below 70MB of RAM usage, because that's basically how far down I can get WinXP Lite's memory usage.

Oh and just a remark regarding the massive kernel size. When I checked out DSL I found that it used an approx 900kb 2.4 kernel. May be I'm wrong, after all I'm not Linux savvy at all, but it seems that they compiled a very slim version of the original 2.4 kernel. So with some work an extremely slim 2.6 kernel version might be possible. Just let me stress once more that it's not what I'm looking for ;)



I'm very well aware of that, but compressing time is secondary. The final size is of more importance to me, because that will stay for the years to come. After 3 years it won't matter whether it took 2 weeks or a month to compress the data. Also, I already mentioned that with Finnix I found a version that not just runs in x64-mode, but also supports multiple CPU-cores, so the performance should be just as good as in Windows.



Is that the same as Debian Minimal, or are those two separate distros?

Yep, and that's the size that you get with a compressed image, which is what the stuff under /boot is. Of course, the image is uncompressed on your ram, so, it's larger than you think.

And besides that, you have a good bunch of modules under /lib/modules/, which are also part of your kernel and need to be loaded before you can use them. To get a realistic measure you would need to build all of these statically into your kernel, and then look at the uncompressed image, and not vmlinuz or similar images.

That's an idea. Just install ubuntu and start tearing pieces out of it.

What is there to gain by stripping it down so small? Once you have all of this ram at your disposal, what is a few mb?

Um, some of those things you quoted are not my quotes ... I didn't say those things.

So then you want to run these smaller distros in virtual machines or something ?

Oops, you're right. I corrected that now :)


No, that would be a waste of ressources and processing power and I need all that I can get. They are supposed to function as an alternate minimalistic operating system, where a single tool can address as much RAM as necessary without having to take the left overs from more memory intense operating systems.