Bare bone (Score 1)

This is definitely the way to do it. Just make a new partition, check it, mkfs.ext2 on it, and start hucking stuff on to it (well, I guess hucking isn't the best word to use in this case, but...) Once you have it mounted you can copy over the device files that you need, compile a kernel and bash, and try getting the kernel to boot (it will start up bash once it cannot find an init program). Then you can get an init program compiled, etc. Although setting up a distro first is much easier, it sort of defeats the whole purpose of creating your own linux/GNU system. This way you get a very up to date and highly customized system to begin with (you'll notice that this "low-level" stuff is really where distrobutions differ). The only major sticking point I found was getting a shadow password suite installed. Oh yeh, and being able to read through source code in order to find out why those cryptic error messages are being generated helps too...good luck!