Small OS to install, Need a small OS Options

[Chefskin]

Good day to you all and thanks in advance for you help. I recently aquired a Asus Eee PC from my son 'cause he got a new laptop. I loaded Easypeasy on it and it works great.
The problem that I'm having is that this thing has almost no memory. Whenever I boot it up it gives me a message that there is only "71.3 MB disk space remaining" As you might imagine this does complicate things in that I can't download updates to the installed software.
So what I need is this, a really small distro or OS that I can install so that I have SOME space left on the drive.
The specs are as follows

Brand: Asus Eee Pc 4G Surf (sometimes known as a 701)
Internal memory: 3.5 GB
RAM: Unknown (sorry I can't seem to find it)
OS: Easypeasy 1.6

In case it matters I'm setting the machine up so that my wife can surf the net and research things for her work. As such it will need to have Openoffice and/or some other word processor that is compatible with Windows Word and Excel as well as a PDF viewer. Although if there is a PDF editor that would be an added bonus.

Any help will be greatly appreciated

[michaelk]

I run Ubuntu 10.04 netbook edition on my 900 and I'm only using ~80%. I don't know the exact differences but if you have several old kernels lying around from past updates that takes up a lot of memory. I use a SD card for data. You could also install the OS to a 16GB SD card which should be enough for your purposes.

[Chefskin]

Thanks for the reply. Being fairly new to linux I'm not sure how to go about finding and removing said kernels. I'll look around on the forums but if you could provide a direct link I'd appreciate it. As to running the OS from an SD card, wouldn't that slow it down considerably? My understanding is that the OS is on the hard drive so the system doesn't run slow.
At any rate thank you and it looks like I need to do a bit more research.

[michaelk]

Look in /boot and see how many vmlinuz files you have. Debian based systems that use apt-get can use this command. If run as root you can remove sudo.

dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2 -d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

This might be easier.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/how-to-remove...-kernel-images/

Yes it will run slower. I did run debian from a USB drive and it was usable but did stall alot.

[SoS]

I've been looking for tiny distros myself, for my old PC. I was going to post a link to an article that might help you, but links aren't allowed. Try googling something like "tiny Linux distros" and see what pops up.

Damn Small Linux is apparently only 50MB, you could give that a try.