I'm slowly making a little progress on this. I recently built (on Ubuntu 14.04) a minimal i386 VM with QEMU with Debian (new version 8 release) Jessie (notes below). Next I hope to add fpcup (or something similar) to compile trunk to get an embedded ARM compiler which I hope to use with Teensy
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12646.
Dowload debian-8.0.0-i386-netinst.iso (330 MB) and rename to debjes.iso
qemu-img create -f qcow2 debjes.img 2G
qemu-system-i386 -m 512 -hda debjes.img -cdrom debjes.iso -boot d
Networking worked without having to add other command line parameters! I removed the 2 default software collections (near the end of the install). The QEMU image file is 1.3 GB.
In the VM:
add sudo (I have instruction near the bottom of this page:
http://controlpascal.com/picoscope.htm)
sudo apt-get clean
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mytempfile
sudo rm -f /mytempfile
sudo halt
After this the new img file is 635 MB:
qemu-img convert -O qcow2 debjes.img debjesnew.img
Archive with 7z and the file is now 143 MB. Not very big for a nice new Debian console VM.