Subject: Cross-compiling distributions?

From: [email-masked] (John Sullivan)
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 11:06:42 -0700

Greetings,

I've been working on bringing up the ARM Linux kernel on a custom system.
This effort has been successful, and I can boot a basic RAM disk image
(loaded from ROM) with /bin/sh linked to /sbin/init, and run small programs.

I'd like to install a smallish-sized set of standard applications and
tools on the system.  However, due to connectivity and space constraints,
it's impractical for me to actually build any SW on the target machine.
Unfortunately, I also don't have access to another ARM-based systems.

Are there well-known tricks to cross-compile any of the standard
distributions for ARM Linux on an Intel-based Linux machine?  It seems
to me that my options are to either:

1. Pull together pre-compiled binaries out of an existing distribution
   and reorganize them to get just the applications I need.

2. Hack up the configure scripts and Makefiles in the source code or SRPMS
   for an existing distribution so that they compile binaries using the
   linux-arm cross development versions of GCC, glibc, etc.

If there's a better way to do this that will save me some time, that 
would be great.  I assume someone else must have gone through this before.

Regards,
John Sullivan
unsubscribe: body of `unsubscribe linux-arm' to [email-masked]

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From: Philip Blundell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1999 22:26:03 +0100

>to me that my options are to either:

Depends very much on the software in question.  Sometimes you can just say 
"CC=arm-linux-gcc ./configure" and everything will be peachy.  The trouble is 
that a lot of configure scripts rely on being able to execute test programs.

>   and reorganize them to get just the applications I need.

This would probably be my choice.  You can fairly easily unpick both Debian 
and RedHat package files to get a plain cpio archive containing the binaries.
Most common software has already been compiled and this is usually easier than 
fighting with a cross compiler.

p.