Problem solved! I'd better document my workaround here in case I or anyone else needs it, and before I forget...
To summarise: I wanted to install a binary distribution (Debian Gnu/Hurd J2); however, the kernel from that CD did not boot on my machine. I suspected shared interrupts in the device drivers, since "eepro100.c" was the last thing I saw before the system crashed, and I know this to be an ethernet driver. So, I wanted to create a Gnu Mach kernel with fewer drivers to avoid these conflicts; I have a Red Hat Linux partition on the machine. So, I got gnumach-1.3, mig-1.3 and the latest CVS hurd. I tried to follow the instructions in http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Distrib/BuildingTheHurd However, I ran into some apparent circular dependencies. It appears that to compile a kernel you need first to compile glibc. To compile glibc you need the hurd headers. Before you can install the hurd headers you must configure the hurd package. However, this does not work since the AC_PROG_CC autoconf test complains "... compiler cannot create executables". Of course, this should not matter since you only want to make install-headers. But it is fatal to the configuration. I note that gnumach-1.3 has some custom autoconf tests which avoid this problem when cross-compiling. But the latest hurd does not. I eventually kludged my way around the problem by adding m4_define([_AC_COMPILER_EXEEXT],[EXEEXT= ]) before the AC_PROG_CC call and rerunning autoconf. This skips the test for the file extension of executables (which we know is supposed to be empty anyway). This trick I learned from the AC_NO_EXECUTABLES autoconf macro. That macro unfortunately does not work here because it does other stuff that causes fatal errors in AC_CHECK_LIB. Then I could install the hurd headers, compile glibc and build a gnumach kernel with a minimal set of drivers, which worked for me. I know cross-compiling seems to be frowned on, but it was really the only way I could get started... -- Peter Wainwright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Help-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-hurd
