Very nearly a perfect little Linux

The only problems with Peanut is that it is not a distro, it is a system image, so you don't have any options to leave out parts that might cause you pain (like sound or 3D support), and it's not very well supported (emails to the author can simply vanish). This new posting about the 9.0 beta are a good sign that maybe the second problem is going to vanish, and maybe he will fix the first problem by putting more into modules and less into the main bundle.

Peanut is more or less a tarball of a system image about 300Mb in size; if you unpack that on a large machine first and then throw out useless parts (like, why does a micro distro need all the help files? why include all the international fonts by default?) you can get it down to maybe 200Mb which will run on any sort of 486. If you do need other bits, I found the RPM/DEB support to be trouble, but slackware packages seem to merge in well with Peanut.

Overall, a very complete package, nicely configured, and has enough bells and whistles to amaze.