I had 2.2.x running on my 386 last year in 4MB. Not enough for a full GUI though but enough to set up TCP/IP and Samba to image a drive over the network.
8MB, at least in an emulator, can run a basic Xterm but not a lot else (though it'll happily run as a remote X frontend for a more powerful machine over Ethernet, it was fun to see it try to render Gimp 3 running on my desktop lol)
My 16MB 486 had no issues with a full IceWM session (this was kind of my hacked version of BasicLinux which itself was built on a ~2000 version of Slackware)
if you have an X server running then maybe you can exploit Xorg/X11's network transparency and run heavier apps on a beefier machine.