What is a good barebones linux distro for beginner kernel development?

Question

In my Operating Systems class we are looking to modify a Linux kernel with some simple system calls of our own in C.

What would be a good distro suited for this purpose? We don't need any frills, no GUI, a vanilla kernel, etc. The more basic the better.

Answer 1

I was able to modify the kernel pretty easily using a minimal Gentoo install. Just install gentoo, follow the installation instructions, then:

$ emerge gentoo-sources
$ emerge emacs
$ cd /usr/src/linux