As far as I remember no one ran it on a 68000 with 2 megabytes of RAM.
Could Linux today run on an Amiga 500 with RAM expansion, in this same way?
In theory it should be possible I think?
I don't exactly recall the memory differences (Chip RAM vs Fast RAM and all that) but assuming you have enough Chip/Fast RAM and thereabout of a megabyte in a storage medium for the actual kernel binary; I don't see why it should not be possible.
If WHDLoad is a thing on base 500/500+ then you'd be able to fit more stuff on the "userspace" side of things, since 1.44 megs can't really hold much (And having to swap floppies in the way Workbench does it is not something I'm sure can be done on Linux).
The main issue I see is that you'd probably need to "free" up memory by unloading Workbench (If it's loaded) and possibly re-configuring the hardware (So it's in a known good state for Linux), but yeah; it should honestly be feasible.
Linux can be built to not need a MMU, I have used that on Coldfire and Microblaze systems, I presume this Jaguar port is using it too.
If you have the stock 020 we (me and the other people messing with this stuff) can make that work. the 68000 support needs one tiny thing, fixing the stack frame differences between the 000 and the 010+, and it'll boot on basically anything.
I already have patches to do it.
For the moment I have a floppy disk that loads my network card drivers and then copies the kernel over the network into ram. That makes debugging things way easier than having to burn a floppy with every code change.