[l33tman]

I was one of the first who worked on embedded Linux, and I put the kernel and a user-space program in a device with 512kb RAM once. It was too tight to do anything useful with, but just barely. It was no problem doing useful stuff on a 2 MB device (this was in 1999) :)

Though to Linux defence, it is not nearly as bloated over this period of time as, say, Windows, by orders of magnitude. And, you aren't required to compile in everything. It's just very tedious (and frankly a bit pointless) to trim it down..