water cooler :: Side Project

Hi all.  I am really impressed with how tiny and featureful DSL is.  I have a project right now that requires a minimal linux install, but so far, nothing does what I need.

I am making a digital picture frame out of an old Thinkpad X20 laptop. Physically, I am almost there, but software wise I am being held up by a gigantic 400MB Redhat "minimal" install.  I need this to fit on a 128MB compact flash card.

The redhat install does everything I want but I cant copy it over to the CF card because its too damn big.  All I want is a tiny linux OS that will boot up, activate my WiFi card (ancient Prism based WPC11), grab a DHCP IP, mount an NFS share, and then use "fbi" or some other framebuffer picture viewer to constantly cycle through pictures in a directory on the NFS share. Oh and I want SSH access to the box.

Like I said, I got it all to work under RH, but it's a monster. I know I dont need half the crap on there, but if I delete the wrong thing then I have to start all over. I still wouldnt feel good about it, either, until I deleted all the non-essential crap.

DSL seems like a better starting point.  It's already damn small, and it was made for a read-only system.

Anyone want to help me out? I plan on making the project details available after I complete it (including the custom DSL image). I will gladly share the credit.

Some one please save me from a Redhat nightmare!  

Hey, I would liek to see a photo of what your doing.

Sounds somewhat, umm... cool, fun and silly at the same time heheh GREAT!

I know a CF card would be much cooler, but laptop HDD are so damn small, why not use one?

Since the size of the flash device seems to be holding you up on putting your working Redhat setup on one, perhaps you could look at a 512 MB device, and see how much they want for one of those. You can get your setup going like you want. I think that DSL might be too much of a hassle to do what you have gotten Redhat to do, since this is a live cd setup, and can be modified, however, but problems do arise with a small distro like this.
The main thing is that you do have Redhat going like you want, which is excellent, really.
---

realmy:  I'll see what I can do about some pics.  I do have a 5GB laptop drive that I am currently using.  The main reasons I dont like it are 1) it's too loud (most laptop drives seem loud to me) and 2) It's not solid state so it will wear out over time (picture frame will be on 24/7). Laptops arent made to be 24/7 machines, much less the harddrives in them. A CF would be quiet and much more durable I think.

Rapidweather: I am trying to keep cost down, so while I could get a 512MB CF card, it would only add on to the total price.  There's no real good reason why I shouldnt be able to fit a linux kernel and a few utils into 64MB much less 128MB. It should be a lot easier than it is.