All I wanted was a minimal root fs with development tools (gcc, make, ...) for UML. This is especially important when, say, you want to test new file system tools which snapshot a directory, and this is only possible when the tools are available inside the root fs. There are many root fs elsewhere on the web, but none with development tools (and rightly so, since for most cases you won't need those).

So created a VM using VMware Workstation and bzip2'ed the '/' without /proc, /tmp, and /sys and manually created those directories outside of the VM. Also chopped down the unnecessary things on startup using chkconfig(8) and modified /etc/inittab to give 2 xterms on boot. Root password is 'guest'.

Have uploaded it on my homepage: http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~gud/tools/suse11.1-rootfs.bz2