I'm the network manager in my school. I set up a Gentoo box using VirtualBox
with 128M of RAM, to serve as the squid reverse proxy server and dns server
in my local campus network.
And it turns out:
{{{
gentoo-vm squid # uptime
 22:49:48 up 7 days, 10:28,  2 users,  load average: 0.35, 0.33, 0.45
gentoo-vm squid # free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           118        114          4          0         60         28
-/+ buffers/cache:         25         93
Swap:          512          7        505
}}}

If your demand is not critical, Gentoo can be quite lightweight :)


On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 8:36 PM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:

> Just for fun, not for boasting ;-)
>
> Out of curiosity, I pared down nearly everything from my Gentoo VMware
> Guest.
>
> `free -m` directly after booting + login:
>
> Mem:
>  total 499
>  used 28
>  free 470
>  shared 0
>  buffers 1
>  cached 12
>
> Granted, system is quite possibly unusable for serious purposes,
> although I can still login (console & ssh) and do `emerge --sync`
>
> But still, I'm amazed at how low Gentoo can go :-)
>
> Well done, Gentoo team!
>
> Rgds,
> --
> Pandu E Poluan
> ~ IT Optimizer ~
> Visit my Blog: http://pepoluan.posterous.com
>
>


-- 
Best Regards,
Einux