In case you're wondering, I am have cd issues and am in process of repair, so I can't just run cd and look for myself. Hope you understand, I am pushing a bit.

I know this is a silly question, but have you tried testing it in virtualbox or qemu? That way you won't really need the cd drive to work.

Going on your research about fiber channels, I'll hazard a guess and say yes because SliTaz 3.0 uses the 2.6.30.6 kernel as shown here:
brenton@trixarian:~$ uname -a
Linux trixarian 2.6.30.6-slitaz #1 SMP Sun Mar 28 16:39:51 CEST 2010 i686 unknown

Actually, Trixar-za I didn't. That's sort of pathetic, as I want to use this as a host for VB! Since posting, I went to a buddies box and booted the cd. Modprobe didn't find an installed module, so I'll have to stick one in, once, I have the OS on a hard drive (Computer is a Dell 2450 which is 100% scsi, no ide, no usb boot. In fact bios doesn't have usb keyboard, mouse support during post, only ps2.) Technically behind the times, none-the-less a great machine. I'm looking forward to using Slitaz as a host for my VB considering that I want very little resources sucked up by the host, or VB for that matter. The Dell is dual PIII, 800MHz, with a max of 1GB ram available. I'd like to run up to 4 guests, so speed and space is under careful scrutiny.

At the moment I'm running SliTaz on a old ASUS PIII 950Mhz machine with 256MB Ram and a 6gig hard drive - a quick test rig build up from spare parts. This box has like no AGP, PCI Express or SCSI.

I think you ran into the biggest problem that SliTaz faces with the modprobe issue because of the small ISO size - Limited space forces SliTaz to leave out certain modules and drivers. This kind of screws up it's support with certain things... Like I use the linux-dialup, usbutils and the wvdial packages, which I had to download before hand so I could get online and use the repository. A minor pain and if you use http://pizza.slitaz.org - one that can be worked around from the start.

All I can say is give SliTaz a proper spin on the machine you want to test it on. That's really the only way you'll know if it will work for you or not.

I've been waiting for about a week now for my scsi cdrom to show up. When that happens I will as quicky as possible get that running. Then we'll see if I need to mess with scsi support with SliTaz. Then I'll move to the fiber channel stuff. If SliTaz runs completely in ram, and not from the hard drive, and if I need to add in support for both scsi and fiber, I might end up being better of ram-wise to run something like a bare bones Debian. Like you said, I'll have to try it and see. One gig of ram ain't much when I have 4 guest op-sys's + a VB + host os all insisting on their own share. Have a feeling that the 4 guests' are pie in the sky, more probably will end up being 2.

SliTaz - like Puppy - runs completely in RAM yes. Which just means you boot with the CD and you can eject it after the system has booted. Puppy uses about 120-180MB or RAM to be booted where SliTaz still only takes a slim 80MB. As for SCSI support, well, I know from experience that with Debian systems (like Ubuntu) that can be a semi-pain especially if the drive is new. Next week I get to experience it with SliTaz too since my new rig is SCSI and PCI Express only. So I'll keep you posted on that.

The biggest issue you might have is a persistant enviroment with SliTaz if you choose to run it without a HDD. Most fix this by making a customised SliTaz version using tazusb and allowing the system to write to that device. That way you can boot from the USB device and have a persistant enviroment that doesn't eat up all your ram if you have one too many programs installed (I've done that before...). You can even use the boot disk they provide at the site to make your system able to boot off the USB flash disk (or CD/DVD) if it doesn't support it in the BIOS, which I found pretty cool.

Hard drives I have, its the ram and speed that I don't have. On my box I can't boot from usb. Maybe I can boot from network, haven't looked into that from a resources viewpoint. My pci is the original! Not even -X. That's limiting. I did find out that I was incorrect on max ram. It's 2 G, not 1. That's a treat. So I just ordered up 4 512MB ecc pc133 ram chips, Waahoo.

If you beat me to the scsi stuff with SliTaz, please let me know what you ran into and how you resolved. I'll do the same from here, but i just discovered that I misplaced my scsi cable so I need to get one of those, once I verify the connector on the back of the yet to show up cd rom drive is what I think it is.

Sounds like your new box should be a screamer. If you can muster it up, try some fiber channel stuff. That is one haulin' bus structure. Makes scsi seem like it's on an isa bus, and scsi's no slouch.

Hard drives I have, its the ram and speed that I don't have. On my box I can't boot from usb. Maybe I can boot from network, haven't looked into that from a resources viewpoint. My pci is the original! Not even -X. That's limiting. I did find out that I was incorrect on max ram. It's 2 G, not 1. That's a treat. So I just ordered up 4 512MB ecc pc133 ram chips, Waahoo.

If you beat me to the scsi stuff with SliTaz, please let me know what you ran into and how you resolved. I'll do the same from here, but i just discovered that I misplaced my scsi cable so I need to get one of those, once I verify the connector on the back of the yet to show up cd rom drive is what I think it is.

Sounds like your new box should be a screamer. If you can muster it up, try some fiber channel stuff. That is one haulin' bus structure. Makes scsi seem like it's on an isa bus, and scsi's no slouch.

If you have the HDD space, then you can just install SliTaz and give it a little ram. The majority of the system will be thrown into the ram (a smallish 29MB out of the 216MB I have around (I use 32MB of it for video)) in that case.

With the HDD install it normally idles at under 10% CPU usage, sometimes dropping as low as 1-2% even. This is a 950MHz processor remember. RAM usages goes as high as 97MB when I have Firefox, XChat, wvdial and Aqualung running. Using htop also adds an extra 1% to the CPU usage and 0.5MB to the memory, but that should give you a rough idea how light SliTaz runs. This using only 13MB of swap space. Also can you believe how small it is? Even with all the packages I have installed (dev and self compiled and more) the size is around 1.5GB. Compared to other Distros, this makes SliTaz uber-light while not being ugly.

I think the biggest hog on your resources will be the virtualbox. Mostly because it will take ram for itself and claim it as it's own. 2GB Ram should be enough for it though and SliTaz luckily won't hog too much of it for itself.

From the little that I have read, Box uses little ram for itself, rather its the guest os's that are hoarding. I did see a SliTaz download for Box, but I'd guess it's the ose version, not the puel. I'd like the puel if possible, since the guests can use remote console usb. I'll install that when I can, and we'll see. As long as I keep the guest list without the latest from Redmond, I should be good to go for those 4 os's after all.