in that case the floppy tutorial is just the thing for you. it gives ways to shrink everything and so. strace, awk, hexedit, less and grep are tools i recomend you to get familiar with.
they, either separate or together in diferent ways, can give you exactly the system calls sent from any given app and list them.

lfs is another good resource for basic linux knowledge.
lfs is a "recepie" how to make a working linuxdist from scratch, read a few times go trough the process and you know most there is to know about linux.
i have done it.
here is a link listing mirrors.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

gentoo is another where you can customize but not quite as much.
their documentation is great though.
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml