Since I frequently find myself wanting a minimal base installation of Raspbian for my various Raspberry Pi based projects, I ended up creating this one.
This Raspbian installation is pretty much the bare minimum, containing only the SSH server, NTP server, less, vim and, of course, rpi-update.
The basis for the generation of this image is the very useful "build_rpi_sd_card.sh" script by Klaus M Pfeiffer (http://blog.kmp.or.at). I have tweaked it to use Raspbian rather than Debian, and hardware floating-point rather than software emulation. Also, I removed a few more packages which I didn't consider necessary.
Login credentials: root/raspberry
The image is a measly 1GB in size, which may not be enough for your needs. You can either resize the root partition before you write it to an SD card, or once you have booted it. For the latter option, below is a transcript of how to do so:
root@raspbian:~# fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3965 MB, 3965190144 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 121008 cylinders, total 7744512 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe4304b18
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/mmcblk0p1 2048 133119 65536 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 133120 1953124 910002+ 83 Linux
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 2
Command (m for help): n
Partition type:
p primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
e extended
Select (default p):
Using default response p
Partition number (1-4, default 2):
Using default value 2
First sector (133120-7744511, default 133120):
Using default value 133120
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (133120-7744511, default 7744511):
Using default value 7744511
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at
the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8)
Syncing disks.
root@raspbian:~# reboot
Broadcast message from root@raspbian (pts/0) (Sun Aug 25 05:09:46 2013):
The system is going down for reboot NOW!
... <wait for raspberry to reboot, then log back in> ...
root@raspbian:~# resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
resize2fs 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012)
Filesystem at /dev/mmcblk0p2 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1
The filesystem on /dev/mmcblk0p2 is now 951424 blocks long.
Note that it is critical the replacement partition starts at the same block as the old partition. In this case fdisk does the right thing by default, but if you're doing this elsewhere, don't rely on it!