[Peeweelinux] compiling old kernel on new Red Hat, as86

[Barry Gershenfeld]

This is an addendum to my adventure building kernels.

Spoiler:  I ended up needing as86, and it's in the dev86 rpm.
          I needed kgcc as well and it's in an egcs rpm.

Story: As a PeeWeeLinux hacker, I'm inclined toward minimalist
systems.  So, when I do installs, I look for things to
leave out, things I'll never use.  Also the questions in those
installs are rather general, so I'm dealing with large sections
of the system at a time.   So it came to pass that I found it
would be nice to have gcc in there for the occasional C program
or test.   That wasn't a problem because there's an rpm for
it.  Then I discovered that just about any utility program I
wanted to compile wanted to see the kernel-headers so I installed 
those, too.    On the next system install I chose  "development".
For that I got, gcc, the kernel, plus the sources for perl, python, 
XFree86, GNOME, java, emacs, ...  I decided to go back to 
installing the packages myself.  Now I keep a list, so I also
know the dependencies.

This weekend I decided to duplicate my efforts and build a 
peewee system on my laptop, which happens to be faster than
the target system I'm building it on here.  I thought the
kernel would compile faster as well.   Oh, it was real
fast.  It was bombing out because kgcc wasn't there.

Now, I didn't know where kgcc came from but I had decided the Magic
must work all the time so I didn't worry about it (see my 
previous message).  Now confronted with this problem I did 
some more searching.   Knowing that kgcc was "the kernel's gcc"
and that in turn was an older version and that it was called
"egcs" back then, I was finally able to locate it in the package
"compat-egcs-6.2-1.1.2.16.i386.rpm"   There is one dependency
so you'll need "compat-glibc-6.2-2.1.3.2.i386.rpm" as well.
These names are for Red Hat 7.3, anyway.

So now I was ready to build the kernel for real.  Everything 
was fine until it couldn't find the program as86.  Back to
research.   It turns out this is the assembler, and it
is in "dev86-0.15.5-1.i386.rpm" for Red Hat.  My searching
turned up the same thing with "bin86" as the package for 
debian users.  Seems as86 is an 8086 real-mode assembler 
for creating code for the boot code in the kernel and the 
boot block for lilo.

Now that I can compile the kernel, I can go back to figuring
out how pwlconfig deals with all of that.

One problem is that I set EXTRAVERSION in the makefile so I 
could be sure it was booting the kernel that I had built...but 
it doesn't show up!  Fortunately the date does, so I think 
I've got the real thing.

Barry