Victory!

After switching virtual network cards in my hypervisor, I was able to get RH7.1 online.  Textutils compiled as statically linked binaries just as expected, and ran like a mo-f'ing CHAMP on the dettuxx machine.  This allowed me to download coreutils-5.0 and compile/install it.

I ran into another circular dependency with awk (which was a pre-req of upgrading Bash), and was able to cross compile the latest gawk and get it installed just fine via the RH7.1 machine.  Now I'm going to try compiling binutils, as another pre-req of bash, and see what happens... Hopefully I won't have to cross compile too much more.

FML

FML... Just... network isn't supported...

Several failed attempts...

Apparently, in order to compile textutils, you need to have textutils installed...  Naturally (to me anyway), my first thought was Busybox.  I tried to compile it, no joy (unmet dependancies), I tried the appropriate binaries for my VM, also no joy... insta-segfault.

Fine, let's get the real sort util, and copy it over, perfect!  So I spend the next 20 minutes configuring another (32bit) VM to support SSH1 on the internal network (since, of course, the version of SSH with Dettuxx is ancient), and get scp working.  Copy the binary over, and it crashes complaining about libraries. File confirmed that it was dynamically linked, with libs that weren't installed in Dettuxx, no doubt.  Fine...

export CFLAGS="-static -O2 -g"
./configure --with-prefix=/home/peter/textutils_build
make
make install

This process went along nicely, and generated a statically linked set of textutils bins (the old textutils package wasn't exactly fun to find, mind you).  I scp these binaries over, and get:  "FATAL:  Kernel too old"

As we speak, I have RH7.1 installing in a VM, running a 2.4 kernel out of the box...  Wish me luck...

Back for more...?

So, all these years later, I decided to give DettuxX another try (I mean... we have VM's now... why not), and was able to get it installed, bootable, and on the interwebs last night...  Thats when I remembered just how much of a bitch it is.  I, by some act of God, was able to get gcc compiled, but that's about as far as I got before I started running into... problems.  In order to compile most things, you need to have sort (which was a part of textutils when the distro was released... now textutils has been rolled into coreutils).  Unfortunately, there's a circular dependancy there.  Textutils requires sort to successfully configure, and sort is a part of Textutils...  Guess it's time to evaluate busy box, and the prospect of cross compiling textutils on another machine and copying it over...  Joy...