Hello, sorry if I intrude in your conversation, but I couldn't help it.
The fact is, I guess I know what the "Key Master" is talking about, so _if_ we had the same idea, maybe we could work it together and save some time.
I had such idea, but still didn't complete it, since you know it's just an hobby I can work on it only few hours in the weekend.
To make it short, I didn't find the distro I need, so I'm going to modify another one.
The first candidate was Slitaz, but ok.
The second candidate is a lightweight distro based on ubuntu, don't say the name but we all know what I'm talking about.
They have those self containing squashfs files .sce, which they build runtime importing directly from ubuntu repos.
Then you can mount them as loops, saving lots of RAM.
Dark note, the sce files contain all, really all, the dependencies needed for that application to run, plus lots of not needed stuffs.
The core is ver 3.16, ~4MBytes, and the initram is really decent, ~11MBytes.
But lets see some .sce example, build-essential.sce 89MB, firefox.sce 92MB, leafpad.sce 23MB, pcmanfm.sce 29MB, xorg-vesa.sce 52MB, lxde.sce 80MB, wireless.sce 42MB, plus other small utils, it gets a total disk space used of 600MB.
It's big, but we are talking about bleeding edge versions.
So I did a test, I was hoping the whole stuffs was full of redundant libs and stuffs, so I expanded all in 1 single ext3 partition.
Yes gets smaller, but unfortunately the whole stuffs all together is still in the order of the 500MB, which is not usable on low ram PC.
So, to save some space, I decided, for what I need openbox, lxde? I'm ok with a less features desktop manager: fluxbox, just 13MB all together, it's doing everything just with its RootMenu on the taskbar, total ram used 300MB, a blast :-)
But still, a very big problem remains, the huge libs dependencies brought inside from ubuntu repos.
Than I had such idea: why just don't take the first .deb of any application I need, run the binary, and it will tell me exactly what libs it needs, then I'll add them one by one, till it runs.
Yes, that takes some time, but at the end, I "suspect" the application will run with less than half of the libs imported from ubuntu repos.
I say "suspect" because that part I still didn't try - sorry.
Also another big issue: enormous fonts!
Those bleeding edge applications are built on gtk3, I googled around and I couldn't find some common way to lower those gtk3 fonts themes all together - sorry