Debian Sarge on USB Thumbdrive

Honestly, I was quite surprised with Debian Sarge. It literally took just installing the OS on a thumb drive for it to work like a charm.

Personally, I downloaded the "businesscard" iso: http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

This is a core system that boots your host computer, sets up your network devices, and installs a debian system over the internet. Amazingly, it works like a charm.

The only thing I did to minimize the installation size was to choose "manually select packages" when queried about the type of system I would be using.

At the end I had an ~300MB rootfs with no gui. Adding in Xwindows server and a personally selcted KDE bumped this up to ~650MB (in other words, don't just ad in the KDE meta-package. Choose which parts you really need).

It's sad how simple it really becomes when a Distro like Debian uses an initramfs. I will definitely be looking into iniramfs for my PXE-Based Linux Test Software for work.