I am new to linux... having worked and been trained in MS systems for what feels like an eternity.... Now that i am starting out with Linux, i wish to start at the very begining and am asking for some assistance with regards to....

All i want on the machine is :

GRUB - The bootloader
Linux Kernal with BASH, no additional editors or tools.

When i boot there are no packages installed, just the two above mentioned items and their dependincies. Is this at all possible and what is the procedure ?

Many thanks to anyone who can assist.

Sounds to me like you should go with gentoo or some LFS distro.

Before i began with linux I installed a full and easy to use distro with a GUI. Mostly because i knew working with a GUI was much easier than starting immeadiatly with the CLI. If I where you I would start with Mandrake or Fedora. These are quite easy installations and give you a rough but good idea of how linux actually works, dont start off right away with just a CLI because it will get really confusing sometimes.

Check out www.linuxquestions.org for some excellent support for many linux questions but offcourse you can also ask them here

But im not the one making your desicions so if you really want to start of with just a CLI version try: Slackware

LFS (LinuxFromScratch) is the closest thing available to what you are asking. The only "problem" is that in order to create your LFS Linux you need an already up & running Linux distribution from which you will compile the parts of your LFS Linux.

If you are new to Linux, do as mindspin says & get an easy to use GUI based distribution such as SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake, etc.

You can find the ISO files for a large array of Linux distributions @ Linuxiso.org