After listening to TiT Radio Episode #15, I found the link that was suggested by Azimuth. This is really, really cool if you want to get some serious command line goodness.
The distro is called inx 1.1 and it is based on ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It is also only a live distro, currently there are no simple install methods. There is a Virtualbox image that you can download and just run without any burning/rebooting/hacking involved. I am going to request that any and all geeks who would like to see this project continue to send feedback to the project. I think it's fantastic and think it would be a great idea for a meta-package to make sure all the cli/ncurses apps that are used in his menu scripts are there, and then have this as an option from gdm to boot into (saving even more resources).
I am VERY taken with this. There are just enough tools to do 98% of what people do with their computers and brings it down to the lowest common denominator. I'm going to be trying to send as much feedback as possible to try and help those guys prepare for a new release using 10.4 when it comes out since there have been some dramatic improvements in the package selection since 8.04 (like screen-profiles a.k.a byobu). Here is an example of some of the cli goodness you get with this tiny and non-resouce intensive distro:
I will be following this distro closely as it will help me also to have multiple VM machines which actually have some applications in them and do more than reply to ping when testing network apps on my host and home network. If you look close at that screenshot the RAM footprint was almost 50mb! Again, that is loaded with apps that are useful if you only take some time to make yourself familiar with them.
Enjoy CLI Geeks, and even if you don't use the whole distro, dig in there and check you the apps that come with the distro to see what you can add your command line arsenal.
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CafeNinja
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