Might be worth doing the CLFS (Cross Linux From Scratch)[1] path since it'll be a LOT faster to compile things like the kernel and gcc on your deskop computer.
I did this and wrote a bunch of scripts to automate the process. CLFS uses busybox and DropBear to keep things really small (~42MB binary for the entire OS, including the Raspberry Pi blobs) - but you'll learn enough to be able to swap out components of your choosing.
I did this and wrote a bunch of scripts to automate the process. CLFS uses busybox and DropBear to keep things really small (~42MB binary for the entire OS, including the Raspberry Pi blobs) - but you'll learn enough to be able to swap out components of your choosing.
[1] http://clfs.org/view/clfs-embedded/arm/