Following a guide I found for making a 10.5 boot disk, I opened the packages on my SL install disk, and only installed CoreServices, Essentials, and Migration Assistant. Then I removed Asian fonts (~100MB). I end up with an OS that's less than 2GB. The disk boots, gets past the Apple logo, and then I get a grey screen with eternally spinning beachball.
I understand that as a last resort, I can run the OS installer the normal way, and then choose minimal components, and end up with a bloated OS. But like I said, I'm trying to get it nice and tight if possible.
I was able to pare down my Mac OS to 3.5GB. Then I tried using disk utility to shrink the partition size to "fit", but the smallest it would let me go is 8GB which is more than double. It would be nice to be able to make a bootable 4GB DVD.
I know it's possible, because my bootable Coriolis iDefrag volume is 1.87GB.
Any idea how to get a partition size down to, say, 4GB?