[webdevver]

i once sat down to go through this as a challenge, but started to get bored quickly. skipping ahead, i built bash, configured grub to init=/bin/bash, threw in coreutils, and was very thrilled to see my very own "distro" boot in under a second (not counting bios init ofcourse) on an ancient p3 box.

i think i disabled everything i could think of in the kernel (including filesystem support, which was quickly rectified) for a truly 'minimalist' experience.

it ofcourse didnt do much but it was very responsive.

[rzzzt]

Same here, I tried it on a 486 and it became an idle game. Just glancing on it from time to time, lines are still running down the screen, OK, move on to other things.

u-root is mentioned in the article -- I used buildroot and busybox for embedded Linux development while in university: https://buildroot.org/