i use a distro not many use in India. It is called ArchLinux.
It has a small base install which is abt 90 mb once u remove stuff like ppp
and xfs progs form the base. It s i686 optimized and so are all its packages
and it has a great package manager called pacman which is lightning fast(
written in C). But this distro is highly dependent on a good net connection!
eg. to get xorg and openbox type
# pacman -Sy xorg openbox