As the title says I am trying to compile Grub 1.96 on a x86_64 system.
There is some compilation-problem and from what I read something expects to be compiled 32-bit.

Can't provide the actual error right now, but in a few hours the system should be finished compiling and then I can test and post the error if necessary.

So, does anybody here know if there is a way to compile Grub? The system is a pure 64-bit system, not multi-lib.

If you mean 0.96, then nope. You can only compile it as a 32 bits program. Hence, you can compile it on an x86_64 system, but only if you have all the needed libs for 32 bits. The headers will be the same though, so no problem in that department. Gentoo does this.

However, is there a reason why you do really need to install it on the system? You can just install it on the boot sector using a livecd and forget about it. Unlike with lilo, you don't need to run grub each time that you modify your grub.conf, so once installed you can just forget about it.

If you truly mean 1.96 (what's to be grub2 one day), then I have no idea, but I thought that one of the advantages of grub2 was that it compiled in many architectures, and not only x86. So my guess is that it should work in amd64.

Yes, I really mean 1.96, the version that some day in a distant future is supposed to turn become Grub2.

Thing is that I am working on a LFS-based distro which is installed by a pile of shell-scripts. I already have Lilo in there, but wanted to offer Grub as an alternative.

I'm not even sure anymore why I actually decided to use 1.96. I think it wasn't just to have the latest version, I think it was something about filesystem-support.

My system is finally done now, so I can test around and see what I can do about this problem, and two problems I just ran into on this last test, but these I don't really worry about. The only thing giving me a headache is Grub.

Maybe I'll try it the "Lilo-way", using the Bin86-package to compile the parts which have to be 32-bit.