Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
I'd like to run a fairly stock Debian installation. I guess that a system with 32M of storage would do if I configured it to use a micro-SD card for main storage. The device would need to support at least 2G of storage, preferrably 8G or 16G.
Given the sucky I/O on SD, you might want to set force-unsafe-io in dpkg.cfg. (Once you understand the implications, of course.) It is also MUCH faster to do the initial install to a real disk (or even tmpfs), then dd the result to the SD card in one go. For overkill, you can set up a read-only root fs with live-build, live-boot and live-config. Last time I looked, a minimum Debian install (plus kernel) requires around 200MB uncompressed. The smallest I can make a bootable Debian image, short of compiling custom debs, is 50MB w/ xz compression. So you definitely won't fit in a 32MB onboard storage :-)