Well, to be honest a hardware-accelerated X server (which you'll get with even something as lowly as a 10-year-old S3 card) is faster than the framebuffer. What

Well, to be honest a hardware-accelerated X server (which you'll get with even something as lowly as a 10-year-old S3 card) is faster than the framebuffer. What you might want to do is run X with a minimalistic window manager. Try "fluxbox" or "blackbox", both of those take about 1mb of memory :)