small linux distros

There are two issues. One is that some of the distributions have bloated installers, so if you don't have enough memory, you can't install.

The other is how much memory is needed to run the OS. This depends more on what you want to do than the actual distribution. If you want to run a GUI, a fair amount of memory will be required, unless you run a very old version of Linux. Running just the text consoles, you can get by with a lot less memory. Of course, the fancier programs you want to run, the slower things will be if you have only a tiny bit of memory, since the system will be swapping a lot.

Once again, people get confused by the existence of all the distributions. The reality is that they pull the kernel and the utilities and the applications from a common pool, so there isn't all that much variation from distribution to distribution. Oh, some will default to a very bloated system, but I'm under the impression even those can be custom installed. And a custom install means you can cut out the bloat, drop the GUI or at the very least use a simpler GUI system. A simple distribution is basically a bloated distribution with the bloat taken out; since you can do it yourself, there is no absolute need for a special distribution.

Note that since the distributions are about philosophy, you get something like VectorLinux that everyone claims is good for older hardware, but the time I looked at it it left out highly useful text-based applications so it could include GUI based apps. So their concept of "simple" was to put in one GUI text editor, and one GUI newsreader, and so on, making the overall distribution smaller, but not necessarily good for real limited hardware.

That said, one has to question why you want to install in 8megs of RAM. The only impediment to having more memory there is that the computer is so old that the RAM has become harder to find. People have tossed out that level of RAM, just last weekend I found a bashed in Quadra 950 with a mbuttive 64megs of RAM, but in the form of 16 4meg 30pin SIMMs. How I could have used that some years back, how fairly useless it is now. But since computers have moved on so much, people aren't even bothering to try to sell that level of RAM.

But even given more RAM, you can surely do better hardware wise. I'm finding Pentium level computers in the garbage now, equivalent to that 200MHz Pentium I bought used in 2001 for $150 so I could run Linux (and it was more than enough for my needs). One has to have a very good reason (such as being in a location where such things are not tossed out, or maybe it's a laptop, though even there one should be able to do better) to bother with an install in 8megs of memory and the level of computer that would have only that much RAM at this point. A better computer is more than a faster clock, since you can make a leap to PCI and it's faster bus, and all that.

Michael