I tested this for only Slackware 2.3; for other
distributions/versions the following numbers may vary.
Diskspace: 28MB + 6.5MB/machine
RAM: I am using X on 8 MB. For only 4MB swap is needed, I guess,
which can be created -- separately for each machine -- in /tmp. Do
not forget to run mkswap.
Speed: I had no problems on a 486 DX2/66 with 8 Megs.
I found a strange error: in the /dev subdirectory SunOS corrupted
the device entries so I needed to rerun MAKEDEV by mounting the
subdirectory onto a disk based Linux box. (The reason was the
differences between the linux nfs and the SunOs nfs: both use 32
bit for the Major and Minor device number, but linux uses 16 bit
wide fields for both, SunOs uses 14 bit wide field for Major and 18
bit wide filed for Minor device number.)
When the diskless linux gets booted, there is only one route
included in the routing table to the tftp server, so you need to
set up correct routing tables. You have two choices here:
Configure every rc.S for every machine by hand
Use a bootp client package and write a generalized setup script