Nanolinux is a fairly new addition to the growing list of Linux mini-distros. It is based on Micro Core Linux and busybox. It comes with alternative tools for most of the important use cases like file manager, browser, image viewer etc. and the screenshots on SourceForge looks quite pretty for a 12MB distro. It runs on a i486 machine with 64MB of RAM. The distro loads in the RAM for a faster execution and if you want to save any data before power off you have to save it to the disk. The performance is blazing fast. You can try it out on a VM as well. It should be possible to run at least some of your own favorite applications on Nanolinux as it is essentially a 32-bit OS. Currently it runs on BIOS based machines and UEFI devices are not supported.
The default user is a non-root one named ‘tc’, probably after TinyCore. The boot speed is awesome. When I tried it on a VM, the distro booted to the desktop in 3 to 4 seconds! The applications launch lightning fast too.
TuxDiary 