The quick and dirty story is that i have two old machines which i had installed linux to ''awhile'' back. So i finally decided to upgrade the kernel on them so i downloaded the 2.6.2 kernel sources from kernel.org. Now when i say old i mean pentium 100-166 (non-mmx) old and i''m guessing compiling the kernel will be painfully slow. Not only that but in the readme it states that you need minimum versions of gcc, bin-utils... and well i @56k i''m seeing more pain in my future. However my windows machine is relatively new and I had cygwin but i had uninstalled it and now i can''t find the install files. I do have a mingw setup in the windows machine that does seem to fit the minimum gcc and binutils requirements. So i just wanted to know is there a way to compile the new kernel with the mingw setup? Basically I''m asking what would be the least painful way to compiling the kernel? Hopefully without having to download a newer version of gcc,bin-utils... Thanks in advance for any help.

maybe you''ll be able to compile some parts of the kernel in windows, but even if you compile it completely I doubt it will work.

p.s.: linux 2.6.2 is really buggy. use 2.6.1 or wait for 2.6.3 instead

Just as a frame of reference: a 2.6.2 kernel took slightly over an hour to compile on my old computer (a PII 300 w/192MB RAM), and about 10 minutes on my new (Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB RAM). So, you''re probably looking at a couple of hours to compile on an original Pentium. Just make sure you don''t screw up the configuration first time round. I''d say you might as well install and build it on the box you''re going to be running it on. Just start the compile and go do something else for a while.

PS: Two hours for a kernel compile isn''t so painful when you''ve tried building XFree86 or OpenOffice on a pentium 2. Gotta love Gentoo...

Thanks for the replies,

The thing is it is a pentium 100 or 133 non-mmx (ie smaller L1 caches) and i if i remember the motherboard doesn''t have any L2 cache. To top it off it only has either 40 or 48 MB of ram and a paltry 200 - 400 MB HD. Then there is the fact that the install distribution is SUSE 6/6.1 and i''m gonna have to download and compile gcc, binutils, make, linux-utils,... to make the system ''compile ready'' so it is much better if i were able to compile on the windows machine. Any ideas, links?

You could download... buy some more recent linux distribution and install that instead

Maybe someone kind and experianced enough could compile a kernel to you in linux box? I know at least debian way to compile kernel does first a distributable package.. but I don''t know how you could do it in other systems.

Leffe, 56k won''t let me download a whole distro without losing my mind first. AP, I''m really doing this for more of an educational experience so I''m really trying to do this with a ''hands-on'' approach.

I saw msys on the mingw page and that it could be made to work with an existing mingw install. (i found out you can do it with cywin too) So i setup msys with mingw and tried the compile quickly without any luck. The cywin download is alot smaller with all defaults, no development tools, so now i''m gonna try setting up cygwin with my existing mingw install and compiling the kernel so hopefully this will work.

this is a copy/paste from my post at kerneltrap.org

Ok i setup cywin to work with my existing mingw setup by setting the path to search the mingw bin directory before the cygwin bin directory.

i moved the unpacked source to the cygwin usr/src/ directory in a directory called linux, so the complete source tree is located in /usr/src/linux.

i then typed make config at the bash prompt. I got a bunch of errors, here is the first three lines returned.

$ make config
HOSTCC scripts/fixdep.c
scripts/fixdep.c:99:22: sys/mman.h: No such file or directory
scripts/fixdep.c:107:24: netinet/in.h: No such file or directory

It seems it can't find some header files/directories that contain them. A quick search indicates that these directories/files are contained in /usr/include and in /usr/src/linux/include/ (where architecture is some platform and one named linux) It seems i'm not even getting as far as the guy did in those links that were posted above.

So I guess since the make file should have no problem finding the headers if they were looking for them in a subdirectory (this is a guess correct me if i'm wrong) i'll assume its needs a symbolic link to /usr/include/ or it needs to be in the path. So is there a properway to do this? Or am i completely off, if so any help will be greatly appreciated.

[edited by - infinisearch on February 15, 2004 12:57:14 PM]