Minimum boot requirements

I don't think there are really any hard and fast rules for this like there are with windows systems. Obviously, the more services you install, the more system resources will be required. If you're only installing a Linux Workstation, fewer resources are required.
I believe Linux will run on an 80386 based computer, but I have run it on an 80486 (40Mhz) microprocessor based computer. You could install it on a hard drive with 500MB. Any less than that would not really be worthwhile. These numbers in this paragraph are minimums.
I recommend a processor that runs at 100Mhz or more, with hard drive space of at least 1GB (Preferably 2-4). You can run with 16 or 32 MB of RAM, but I recommend 64M. I have run Linux servers on systems with 32M of RAM and it will activate the disk swap space just to do the install.
Of course, the more services you install and run, the greater the system requirements will be. Keep in mind that Linux will run fairly well on low end systems compared to Windows systems.
For a breakdown on the available Linux services see:
http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/howlinuxworks/linux_hlservices.html
For additional help see:
http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/usersguide/index.html
And therest of the documentation and websites listed at:
http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/index.html
Hope this helps.

Mark

Since you noticed stuff while installing I
assume you have a functioning
workstation-install. Actually, as you
noticed, you are already running a bundle of
services, and therefore _ACT_ like a server.
The minimum you need to do running a
(slightly) reliable server (security, load,
...), is comment out unneeded stuff, mostly
in /etc/inetd.conf. Comment everything out
that you don't need or recognize. Usually
that's about everything :) Especially switch
of telnet, ftp, sunrpc, rsh,rlogin,rexec and
the like. Then set up the service you intend
to provide.

Absolute minimum for a reasonably "modern" kernel are a 486 with 8MB of memory, and about 128MB of nonvolatile storage (64 is functional but not with many services)... the downside is that doing any sort of logging eats up your storage too quickly, so if you're having difficulties getting some services to run properly you'll have to set up another Linux box as a syslog server and have the machine in question log to that. A good starting point for such systems is the Linux Routing Project, which has the kernel and all the networking stuff in about 2 MB. Note that to get many services running you'll have to definitely customize the kernel, and it's probably easiest to do all the compilation and such on a faster machine with more storage and then move only the binaries to the box with little storage. Depending on how responsive you need the server to be, you'd want to up the processor and especially the memory. For comparison, a facility I know of proxies its network connections for an entire T1 through a Pentium 90 with 32MB of memory, and it runs at around 10-15% CPU utilization.

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