In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a fairly rank newbie. I have an NSLU2 (which runs the ixp4xx processor) running Debian Lenny (2.6.26) that I got from the site www.nslu2-linux.org. It is working well and I've had no problems with it. When I tried to add some features (a UPS and S3fs), I realized that I needed to add a couple of kernel features. When I ran into the option of cross compiling the software (kernel and s3fs) on my laptop, it became my mountain to climb ("because it's there. . ."). Alas, I have failed at every turn. There may be other methods, but I'm determined to get smarter or fry my slug trying.

I've tried all four methods listed here and I've had the most success using make-kpkg. I've even built a debian kernel package and attempted to install it on my slug, only to be told that the package was created for arm architecture and the slug is armel. My limited understanding is that armel=ARM+EABI+little endian. The problem I see is that the debian sources do not come with armel Makefiles, only ARM. Also, to get make-kpkg to complete, I had to subsititute

for in the make-kpkg options.

would appear to compile the kernel (I could see built-ins and modules being loaded) but would show a version mismatch (something about utsrelease.h version not matching the current version. The utsrelease version showed "2.6.26" and the current version showed "..") at the end of the process (potentially when it was building the .deb?). The arm actitecture fixed the problem so it built the .deb but it then would not install on the slug (probably saving my bacon, I realize).

I'm working with crosstool to build my own cross compilation toolchain with which to manually compile the sources (my previous attempt at that told me that I was using the wrong version of the compiler; it was expecting gcc 4.1 and couldn't find it and I cannot find the pre-built gcc-4.1-cross using synaptic) but we'll see. I note that crosstool has scripts for ARM and ARMEB but no ARMEL. Hrmph! I currently have a pre-built toolchain installed that I got from EmDebian.

Can anybody offer me some help? I'd really like to get make-kpkg to work for me as it appears to present me with my solution already packaged for installation. I appreciate it in advance and look forward to learning something.