I'm currently building minimal debian system for my backup & samba server. I just happen to have 512MB brand new CF card and CF-to-IDE reduction. This is my story of how to get (fully) working debian system on it.
/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/01-nodoc
and removing them:path-exclude /usr/share/doc/* path-exclude /usr/share/info/* path-exclude /usr/share/man/??/*
./ ./SUPPORTED ./charmaps ./charmaps/UTF-8.gz ./locales ./locales/en_US ./locales/en_GB ./locales/iso14651_t1 ./locales/iso14651_t1_common ./locales/iso14651_t1_pinyin ./locales/i18n ./locales/translit_combining ./locales/translit_neutral ./locales/translit_circle ./locales/translit_cjk_compat ./locales/translit_cjk_variants ./locales/translit_compat ./locales/translit_font ./locales/translit_fraction ./locales/translit_hangul ./locales/translit_narrow ./locales/translit_small ./locales/translit_wide
Alternatively, you can just comment every line in /etc/locale.gen and hope it won't break anything, or tell the system to use C locale.. Haven't tried that.
/etc/fstab
:tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/log tmpfs rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/lib/dhcp tmpfs rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime 0 0
You will need to remount root after boot and before samba (TODO: Simple init script)