Kernel recompilation on a Pentium 300MMX

slylittlefox · 29 Jun 2010 at 19:17

I've spent the past couple of days trying to get the Netgear MA401 wireless card working with my old (really old) Sony Vaio PCG-505TX. I'm using the MA401 because it's a 16-bit PCMCIA card, which is all the Sony takes.

So getting the card working isn't the problem, connecting to WEP networks is fine. However, my network is secured using WPA2. The MA401 doesn't support WPA2 out of the box, but reading around I found out its firmware can be flashed to a version that does support WPA2 using the hostap_utils package (and more specifically the prism2_srec utility).

However, the hostap module that's not part of the kernel doesn't have the necessary option built-in, and so I've recompiled the kernel (2.6.26-2) on a Celeron D box I've got, which still took nearly an hour and a half.

But after moving it back to the Vaio the kernel headers deb package won't install, because it says it requires libc6 v2.8 and the Vaio only has 2.7. The linux-image package installs fine.

Now other than either:
a) Building a system that uses the same version of libc6 as the Vaio
b) Compiling the kernel on the Vaio, which will take a good few days with the potential of not working

Have I got any other options? I've tried a force install, and I've done a dist-upgrade, but neither have solved the problem.

I know you're probably think "why bother", but it's just the fact that I can't do it that is making me so determined to do it

Any help/advice is appreciated.

leezer3 · 29 Jun 2010 at 23:05

Compile against an alternate version of libc6

Install v2.7 & it's headers on the Celeron D, and then follow this:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Glibc2-HOWTO-6.html

-Leezer-

slylittlefox · 29 Jun 2010 at 23:49

leezer3 said:
Compile against an alternate version of libc6
Install v2.7 & it's headers on the Celeron D, and then follow this:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Glibc2-HOWTO-6.html

-Leezer-

Cheers for the reply! That link looks to be a real help.

What's the easiest/safest way of installing the v2.7 of libc6? Just download and compile from source?

From what I've read I should tread incredibly carefully where libc6 is concerned as it's stupidly easy to break an installation.

leezer3 · 3 Jul 2010 at 00:15

Yep, that's the way I'd do it, straight from the source.
If in doubt, take a quick image of the system drive first, and you can always restore if things truly foul up

Adding versions of libc6 shouldn't do any harm though-
It's only an issue if you start removing them.

-Leezer-

slylittlefox · 3 Jul 2010 at 00:54

Yeah I've done a bit of reading - I'll install the -dev version which shouldn't touch the working config, and I'll do it in chroot just to be sure

Cheers for the advice

Aod · 12 Jul 2010 at 09:31

...my PHONE has four times as much ram and twice as much CPU grunt as your laptop! :eek:

jack.mitchell · 12 Jul 2010 at 23:30

Just a side note - can you not break the kernel down to the exact modules etc you need and reduce compilation time ten fold to do some testing... I know you can get it small enough to compile in 10 minutes on machines if you cut out the bulk.

slylittlefox · 13 Jul 2010 at 12:20

Aod said:
...my PHONE has four times as much ram and twice as much CPU grunt as your laptop!

It's worth it, it's a great little machine

jack.mitchell said:
Just a side note - can you not break the kernel down to the exact modules etc you need and reduce compilation time ten fold to do some testing... I know you can get it small enough to compile in 10 minutes on machines if you cut out the bulk.

Yea I was thinking about this - is there anyway I can do an lsmod on the working system, and then somehow import the list? Obviously I'm already using the current kernel config when configuring the kernel through menuconfig, but that will have all the modules built in.

I suppose I could start by ripping out all the multimedia modules.