if you set it up somewhere else you can copy just what you need.
in fact, you could probably boot from cd on another machine, make an archive of just
what you need, then unpack that onto the CF card, if you haven't
the space to do a full installation anywhere.

in any case, 250 Mb should be plenty for many purposes
(given that a stripped down system will fit in the 16 or is it 32 mbyte flash on an ipaq)