Ethereal

I've seem someone - I'm pretty sure it's the same person - complain about another distro besides DSL because he had to look for Ethereal instead of it being installed by default. He makes it appear that he finds Ethereal to be an essential tool in his daily use of Linux.

I seriously doubt that this is the case, or he wouldn't be talking about using it from a Live CD. In real life, Ethereal tends to accumulate large data files that could easily overwhelm a system running entirely from RAM and CD.

Introducing it to a discussion of compact OSs for low-end hardware is completely spurious, and suggests that there isn't a real debate going on here, just someone taking aim at whatever he can knock, for whatever reason.