How does one minimize the base environment plus Xorg for lowend machines?

[Super Bisquit]

The G3 B&W has been volunteered as part of an effort to use a Lombard- The
laptop has the same cpu- as a device for the visually impaired. I'm
currently running a build of orca and attempting to lessen the build by
removing unnecessary build options.
The release is the 9.0-CURRENT recently announced on the mailing list.
The attempt of porting emacspeak to the machine failed when using an old
port on a OpenBSD install. NetBSD was difficult to boot due to not knowing
the proper boot commands. (If someone knows how to do this or can show me
what I did wrong, I'll be glad to read.)
Tiny BSD seems to be optimized for i386 processors. Can this be used on a
Lombard or a B&W with Xorg and the r128 driver?
One of the light "Box" desktop environments can be used or the cwm from
OpenBSD and orca setup to run along with it.

This email should explain my curiosity for Linux emulation and a reference
earlier to NetBSD. Eric- the other person in the email header- and I
attempted an OpenBSD install with both 4.8 and 4.9. Current crashed and 4.8
would hang with either the ATIBUS or during an install of a meta package.

I can attempt- with guidance- to build packages. Mr. Grehan and Mr.
Whitehorn, I've included Mr. Oyen's email so that you may ask him about our
recent efforts.

Really not sure about building packages on the Quicksilver for the
G3/Lombard machines.

B&W working environment has been minimized to match near the same size as is
available on the Lombard.
Adriane (debian/Knoppix) was a suggestion by myself. Eric had noticed that
the code wasn't optimized for PPC systems.

Building orca is slow. Should have rebuilt the kernel first.