I'm trying to compile a new kernel on my shiny duel-processor-wielding desktop (Ubuntu 8.10) for transfer to an embedded router I'm setting up (Soekris 5501 with Slackware 12.1) which only has 433mhz 256mb RAM, and a CF card. Figured I'd save myself some time..

My problem is that when I'm configuring the kernel, I don't seem to be able to select the right processor architecture, or family! Curious, I tried seeing my available options on my current firewall (Slackware 12.0). On my current firewall, I have more options available when selecting the processor.

Whats going on here? Am I missing some header files? Is compiling the kernel on one machine, and transferring to another a valid way of doing things?

See the screen shots if necessary:
http://osquat.com/support/

Did you download the kernel source package from the Ubuntu repository, or the clean source? You want to use the vanilla source tarball from kernel.org, and nothing else.

As for compiling from one machine to another, there is no problem in doing it that way, just remember to copy everything across. If you can avoid using modules (which should be easy on a static piece of hardware like a router) you can make things much easier on yourself.

That said, your router is faster than my server which I use to build kernels on, so I am not sure it is really necessary to go through the trouble...but to each his own.

This is a vanilla kernel. I copied the same source from my current firewall to my desktop for compiling, so the screen shots show the same code in menuconfig. I then downloaded a fresh kernel and tried (thinking I might have done something terribly wrong) with the same results as the screen caps I attached.

Ah! Could it be my desktop is running x86-64, and I'm trying to compile a 32-bit kernel? At least now I've got a place to start googling. I found this diff which I believe was intended for one of the kernel read me files. RTFM. I now have all identical choices between the two as far as processor architecture / family.

# make menuconfig ARCH=i386

Thank you!