alexjamestodd, I get where you are coming from. If you look through the forum you will see where I was looking for very light distros for old machines with limited RAM. Blahblahblahx was trying to build a mini edition but real life had to come first. This is completely understandable, things like family, work and schooling have to take priority. The idea Fred proposed will work if you have a decent machine to start with but if you are installing on an old machine with limited RAM you need something minimal from the start.
TinyFlux was the only distribution I could get to install on a pc with 128 MB of RAM. TinyMe would freeze during the install and the dock and desktop icons were unstable, (they kept vanishing from the desktop). The kernel a light distribution uses is a factor too. If the kernel is too new it has problems with a BIOS that is pre 2000. Puppy Linux would be good but it has no partitioner, so the drive has to be ready before the install.
AntiX provides base installs where you build the system how you want it. I have seen Mepis community members build their own custom versions of Mepis with a variety of desktop environments using the AntiX base install. I mention this because they are the only pure Debian distro that is doing this with a high success rate right now.Making pure Debian install from a Live CD is no easy task normally.
I checked out Icebuntu and it looked promising but seemed incomplete to me. It was light enough but I could not shut down or restart from the Live CD without using the terminal.AntiX proves IceWM can be awesome and attractive. I would go as far as to say they lead in the use of it. I looked at distros like Fluxbuntu and many others but the minimum requirements were too high or they ran at snail speed. The very best truly light distros were TinyFlux and AntiX.
Sorry for the long reply but I have been seriously looking for truly light distros to salvage old machines. I have been experimenting with desktop environments and applications for a couple of months now on old hardware to find the right combination for usability and performance on old hardware. As I see it, it could be done but it could not have things like mintUpdate running in the background. Old versions of Netscape work best for web browsing because you can still have multimedia playback with limited RAM. Firefox 3 is too big and bloated for 128 MB of RAM and multimedia is out of the question using it.
Well, I have rambled on log enough! Just pointing out what I have found.