On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 12:33, Michael Lake wrote: > ... and if you take the GNU out of a Linux distribution you're left with > a kernel that can't be recompiled, no make and compile tools, no tar > etc. It's about as usefull as a cat's furball :-)
I took a look at this a little while ago. Possibly some time around April 1 last year (http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug/2003/04/msg00021.html :-). The exercise was to build a working machine using no software owned by the GNU Foundation, and as little as possible distributed under the GPL. If you're not doing any development and can excuse the fact your software was built with gcc, it's fairly easy. A working system based on uclibc and busybox is a snap, and from there you can port utilities from your favourite BSD without major dramas. I never bothered going as far as a GUI, but building your favourite X server combined with, say, KDE, would be the next logical step. Intel's icc is about the only non-gcc compiler that can compile the linux kernel. At the time it required a kernel patch and some trickery, but google seems to imply it's a little bit easier now. I also had some success with alternative makes like pmake (although I don't recall if it ever completed a kernel build). The only thing that had me really stuck was a linker; intel's ld merely wraps around whatever else is on your system. I couldn't find anything that'd even compile, let alone link anything useful. Cheers, -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
