cat old laptop + ditro? > digital picture frame

well, you'd clearly want the distro with the least bloat - where you can choose exactly what you want to install. i mean, it sounds like you don't even need X. so the obvious candidates, i suppose, are gentoo and lfs.

i personally would end up using gentoo. but i haven't used a binary distro in years, so they could very well be configurable for as little bloat as possible now. i don't know, so it's really up to you.

well, if you have another gentoo machine networked with the laptop, you can use that to share the compiling load.

or you could compile on a faster computer and copy it over.

or you could just use a stage 3 tarball or something. it won't be as optimized as compiling from stage 1, but the issue here isn't exactly optimization, it's bloat - right? the stage 3 tarball has all the files you'd have to install anyway, just precompiled - so it's not really any extra bloat. and i doubt compiling yourself vs using precompiled would make a big difference on something as basic as a picture frame.

well...

like rob_ix suggested, you could use distcc. the faster computer would do almost all of the work. that's probably the easiest way, without all sorts of copying around.

the other computer could do the compiling if it has a similar or higher generation processor. for example, if you had a pentium 166, then a pentium4 could compile, if you set make.conf to only compile with optimizations for pentium (pro). then you could either set up a full gentoo install in an empty partition, or emerge and tell emerge to build binary packages and not merge, and move those over and extract them.

or you could even do it the old fashioned way - put the hard drive in the faster comp, do a full install, and take the hard drive back out and put it in the slower one.

if it's not a pentium, then you would have to stick with a lower level of optimization, like i586 or i686. (i don't remember if an old processor at 166 is i586 or i686. or even i386, for that matter. for appropriate optimization level, i mean)

... are you sure 2 gigs isn't enough for stage 1? i only had a 1 gig var partition for compiling, and /usr can't be that big...

i've seen mentions on the gentoo forums of bootstrapping on 2 gig machines, even so small as 1.2 gigs and 700 megs.

you might find these threads of interest:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=4135
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=58231

there were a couple suggestions in the 'insane machine' thread that i found particularly applicable to your situation:
1. remotely mount some of the space from your 8886. for example, /var/tmp/portage, or possibly just /usr/portage/distfiles. you would probably have to use NFS, though, because you'd be without samba.
2. your use flags could make a difference. for example, removing the java useflag will tell gcc to completely omit its gcj java component, saving more space.
3. you might be interested in an alternate install, with a boot floppy or something instead of a cd.
4. and i think distcc will really be _extremely_ helpful, so it won't take days to bootstrap.

remote mount some of your sager's space, use distcc to borrow the sager's processor, and i think you have a pretty good combination.

i've never had much success with ghosting to cds. (or ghosting at all, for backing up partitions on cds, i mean. it works great for drive-to-drive or partition-to-partition)

of course, if you have redhat up and running, you could just be lazy and leave it. i'd consider putting gentoo on the laptop a way to challenge yourself if you're up to it.