> Well, it turns out that there are 79 packages in the base dist, > but once you go in and out of dselect, you end up with 169 packages. It > takes up about 220M of space. dselect tries to install packages from priority 'Standard' by default. This is why there are more packages. That and 'Recommends'. If you want the absolute smallest Debian box possible just untar the base.tgz into an empty ext2 partition.