Building a simple lightweight web kiosk system with Arch GNU/Linux

Optimized for maximum boot speed and read-only filesystem operation (especially for usb drives and other flash memory cards).

DISCLAIMER : As always, use this tutorial at your own risk!

Hardware used for this howto :
Mini-ITX motherboard with Pentium-M 1.5GHz (centrino)
512M DDR ram
Integrated graphics, sound and ethernet.
8G Compact Flash card with IDE-CF adapter.

A fast and lightweight Linux desktop with CRUX Linux 2.7 (i686)

http://crux.nu

Main advantages for CRUX :
- fast (simple yet efficient boot scripts) and “keep it simple” principle (targeted at experienced users)
- contains only essential software (reduced disk space usage)
- good package manager with support for dependencies (prt-get) and BSD-like ports system (few but quality packages)

Some cons :
- kernel must be compiled during installation process
- being a source-based distro, compilations will take a long time on slower machines
- no support for native languages (but this is done on purpose)