If anyone is interested in a simple, no-nonsense version of TeX, check out Thierry Laronde's KerTeX (http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html). The whole thing comes in at a bit under 10 MB, and it can run on Linux, *BSD, and even Plan 9! I compiled it on Plan 9, built LaTeX as per his instructions in the README, and have been happily generating LaTeX documents since then :)