[Soekris] Minimalist *nix distro?

[Ron Watkins]

As Andy Michaels says, flashdist is very good; it's a stripped-down 
OpenBSD install with a script that will build and configure a CF for you 
automatically on another OpenBSD box.  Once you have a good image, you 
can just dd it to all your other cards.  By default it runs SSH, but you 
can turn that off by commenting out the end of the rc file.  It's pretty 
obvious where it does this. 

The flashdist script installs all the files listed in flashsmall.txt.  
So you can prune out anything you want, and then add in the bind files.

It sounds like what you want is an appliance, and OpenBSD gets closest 
to that.  The chance of you being forced to patch that system, while 
non-zero, is lower than pretty much any other OS.   FreeBSD is fine, but 
for this usage, I think OpenBSD would be better. The Linux kernel, on 
the other hand, is a constant stream of problems and bugs, and I don't 
recommend it for a low-maintenance environment.  If you really want to 
use Linux, I'd suggest using Adrian Bunk's stable tree.  With that 
kernel, at least you're not forced to accept new, untested features to 
get your (many, many) bugfixes.