The most important specification of our target "minimum requirements"
is the amount of RAM. Some projects I looked at following links from
Ingo Lantschner's post were considering a 32MB RAM minimum  and the
Ubuntu-Lite wiki mentions 64MB. I do not think it practical to run
OpenOffice in either case as the Resident Set Size of OOo is about 50MB
and some RAM will be required for the window manager etc. (We only want
to use swap for programs that are currently not active or things will
become painfully slow)

Is the ability to _output_ files in .doc format really a requirement?
AbiWord can do rtf which MSWord can read and does not require as much
RAM. The RSS is about 12MB. Other word processors require even less.

One thing we should decide is what we mean by _Ubuntu_ lite as distinct
from say Sarge lite. Is it the use of the Ubuntu repositories, the
Ubuntu installer, or the  way Ubuntu handles hardware. Will we use an
auto mounter to mount floppy disks or CDs?

Ken Caldwell
I have a distribution based on Debian Sarge that takes up 828MB of disk
space for the installed files and allowing for a swap partition and
space for the User's files would fit on a 1.5GB HDD. Another similar
distro intended for higher spec'ed machines (128MB RAM and > 1.8GB HDD
) installs about 1.2GB of files.