Slitaz

[SealLion]

Christophe Lincoln has announced the availability of the first release candidate for SliTaz GNU/Linux 5.0, the project's upcoming stable release of the distribution that prides itself to be extremely fast, small and capable of running on older computer systems: "The SliTaz team is pleased to announce the availability of SliTaz GNU/Linux 5.0 release candidate 1 (RC-1).

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

This newer edition and update was released a couple of days ago. Should have posted it then. Oh well...

SliTaz GNU/Linux is a mini distribution and live CD designed to run speedily on hardware with 256 MB of RAM. SliTaz uses BusyBox, a recent Linux kernel and GNU software. It boots with Syslinux and provides more than 200 Linux commands, the lighttpd web server, SQLite database, rescue tools, IRC client, SSH client and server powered by Dropbear, X window system, JWM (Joe's Window Manager), gFTP, Geany IDE, Mozilla Firefox, AlsaPlayer, GParted, a sound file editor and more. The SliTaz ISO image fits on a less than 30 MB media and takes just 80 MB of hard disk space.

That's the great thing about smaller distros like this one. They are small and packed with functionality.
I remember using this one from USB. And ya, it was fairly quick. And not just to start up either.

For more info go here: DistroWatch.com: SliTaz GNU/Linux

[Master Razor]

This is especially useful for a USB recovery stick. Loads in a few seconds even with a usb 2.0 stick.