I went down the LFS path a year ago, but then I found buildroot (https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/). I had a super old desktop system (running dos

I went down the LFS path a year ago, but then I found buildroot (https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/). I had a super old desktop system (running dos and jnos, an amateur radio packet bbs). We have repurposed it as an APRS node and no longer needed the PC to do anything, but wanted to have it run minicom and display the aprs activity. The bios only supported booting off of the hard drive or floppy drive (could not boot off of cd or usb). I first tried attaching the hard drive via usb to a virtualbox vm so I could do a minimal linux install, but kept running into little glitches. Then I found and used buildroot to make a small OS with just enough to run minicom. Installed this to the hard drive along with a bootloader and it amazingly all worked. I wouldn't have put that much time into something commercially, but I saw it as a fun project/learning experience. I would definitely recommend buildroot for anyone looking to build a custom (tiny) linux os.