EconoPuppy in particular I put on with even less room. There are probably
others, but you could tell it to use it as a Swap partition, too.

I have found that most distribution run well on 1G or more. Of course you room
for additional programs may be limited.

I'm perplexed about what exactly you are saying. If you mean RAM then
I agree, but if you mean hard disk space you are in conflict with the
official Ubuntu documentation, which states, (at
https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/installation-guide/i386/minimum-hardware-reqts.htm\
l)

No desktop 64 megabytes [minimal RAM] 256 megabytes [recommended
RAM] 1 gigabyte [hard drive space]
With Desktop 64 megabytes [minimal RAM] 512 megabytes [recommended
RAM] 5 gigabytes [hard drive space]

I don't imagine many people want to run without a graphical desktop
even though it can be done. Is there anyone here who runs CLI only?

I had the same idea. I dont relish the idea of having to get a RAID card
to combine all of them but its kind of fun trying to find one thatll fit.

I do not run cli only except on my server tower. I do have an old laptop
that I run without a desktop environment though. X is started on demand as
needed and a window. Manager is installed. It is at work and most of what
I do on that is using a command line statistics program.

I would consider a similar setup with a netbook, only installing firefox
perhaps? There are also a lot of programs with curses/ncurses (which
gives terminal a sort of gui if I understand that right). I recall an
earlier discussion on this list that those programs might be popular for
ham radio interfacing? I've not really looked into it before.

Definitely true that I don't think too many of the pre-prepared desktop
OSes would install in under 1GB.

Speaking of cli only though... Have you tried any of the cli web browsers?
I haven't lately, but remember well the last time I did. It was shocking
how severely tied to the mouse I am when interacting with the web. But I
hardly even noticed that at first. What I really couldn't get over were
the lack of images. (I think there are terminal programs that overcome
both of those limitations if I remember right).

There are many distros that install in under 1 GB of HD space. Some in as
little as 10 MBs with GUI. Many will run from RAM, including Puppy Linux.
SliTaz (35 MBs and 48 mBs of RAM) and Tiny Core (12MBs and 48 mBs of RAM)
spring to mind as very small. For the truly adventurous there is MuLinux
and ttylinux (5-10 MBs and will run from a floppy drive) Here is a a
partial list:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Minimal_Linux_distros