If you are looking for an embeddable Linux to package....

[Peter Alcibiades]

Look no further!

Distrowatch has a review of Slitaz Linux.  Its a 25mb live/installable CD with 
a full graphical desktop.  25mb is not a typo!   It seemed so unbelievable 
that I immediately downloaded and fired it up.  Its real, and it works, and 
its graphical, and being totally memory resident, its very fast indeed on 
just about anything.  Modern kernel, and uses JWM as the window manager, and 
SLIM as the display manager.  Even includes Firefox in its 25mb.

I'm enthusiastic about the many odd and quirky manifestations of open source, 
and many will not share this, but if you are ever looking for a tiny, very 
fast, fully functioning OS to package with your application, this is worth 
looking at.  It runs Revolution just fine - at least, it runs compiled 
applications, and StackRunner.  I did not try the IDE yet.

There is an issue with fonts, font sizing and fields.  Unlike with the 
standard distributions, the fit of the text onto buttons was not perfect.  
This is probably due to not having all the fonts, its something one would 
have to tweak.  But probably also, though I haven't done this, you would get 
around it by running the IDE itself on Slitaz and tweaking that way.

If you do try it, you'll probably want to mount a flash drive to try out apps, 
and its not totally obvious how to do this.  At least in this incarnation you 
have to use the manual mounting tool, and I had to specify sdb1 manually.

If you want something a little less barebones, then of course Slax or 
PCFluxbox or Puppy.  But this one is where for some reason you want something 
even more minimal.  The kind of system that will only run Win 98, but you 
need proper security.  The charitable sector comes to mind.

Peter