It appears that, with some effort, you do not need more than an 8-bit chip - despite the 32-bit requirement - 25-year old RAM and half a gigabyte of storage. It's not what you would call a particularly fast system, but it is astonishing that Grinberg got it to work at all.
Grinberg programmed an ARM emulator for the ATmega1284p to boot Linux (kernel 2.6.34), which decreased the effective emulated clock speed of the chip dramatically and ended up at about 6.5 KHz. The boot process took about two hours. the developer noted that the system is "somewhat usable". Typed commands deliver replies within a minute, he said. The overall result is the "cheapest, slowest, simplest to hand assemble, lowest part count, and lowest-end Linux PC," he wrote in a post detailing the system.
