While not smaller than this, the smallest (and my first distro) linux install I ever did was on a Compaq 386/SLT laptop (luggable?) that had 6 MB of RAM... ...

While not smaller than this, the smallest (and my first distro) linux install I ever did was on a Compaq 386/SLT laptop (luggable?) that had 6 MB of RAM... ...why such a weird amount of RAM? Well, when I bought the laptop used its battery (NiCad) was dead, dead, dead - and I didn't have the money to have it properly re-built. So instead, I built my own. I scrounged a bunch of old but usable AA cell NiCad packs from cordless phones (remember those?) and soldered up my own pack, and wrapped it in a bunch of layers of electrical tape. Unfortunately, it didn't fit into the battery compartment completely... One end was being blocked by the memory! I found that by cutting the battery pack area larger, and removing one stick of RAM (the laptop had 8 MB of RAM originally - 4 x 2 MB SIMMs) - it would fit and still boot - so that's what I did. The laptop originally ran DOS. My first mod was to install Caldera's OpenDOS (a great version of DOS for the time, btw). Then I found and installed...Monkey Linux. This was an interesting "cut down" but fairly full-feature linux distro. It's crazy claim to fame was using the DOS filesystem for itself, instead of it having its own filesystem: http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/ http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/