Seems you didn't read his question carefully and didn't looked at the Xess board he meant (o;
This board is way enough for running uClinux...even has CF interface and USB...the ethernet hip is supported by Linux as well...and the Microblaze core takes around 1/6 of the FPGA...
Would say a nice board to start with with plenty of features (o:
For the memory consumption...you can go down to 1MB RAM if you don't need the newest Kernel and all the fancy features/applications...