Error I've never seen when trying to compile the kernel
 

I am trying to recompile my kernel in order to install the nvidia drivers
properly on my amd64 system, and I am getting the following error message:

And, then, I'm back at the command prompt. Like I said, I was doing this with
the goal of installing the nvidia drivers, but I'm thinking this points to a
serious problem that will need to be fixed before I can getthe drivers running.

I still consider myself an inexperienced user when it comes to compiling stuff,
but I've never heard of this type of error before.

I'm running Debian Etch with the 2.6.16-2-amd64-k8 kernel.

Can anyone point out what might be causing this error? Thank you in advance.

The future time means your clock is wrong, or you corrupted the timestamps on your filesystem. Check to be sure that your system time and date are set correctly? Alternatively you may download a fresh file, wait a year or so for your time to catch up, temporarily set your clock forward, or use a utility such as touch to change the timestamp of the files.

The other error means make is looking for a file fixdep.c and can't find it.

Since you are using Debian, I assume that you are following Debian directions for compiling a kernel. If not, you may want to browse this thread before you continue. Its been active for about two years, so there's alot to read, but the topic is Debian kernel compiliation.

Thanks for the tip
 

Thank you very much for the assistance.

I apt-get installed ntpd and fixed the clock issue.

Now, I need to figure out what is causing the dependency problem.

Does anyone have a suggestion as to how to resolve this dependency
error? Thanks in advance.

fixdep is part of the package 'linux-headers-2.6.16-2-amd64-k8'. You should have it. If it were me, I would remove and reinstall the headers.

Same compile error
 

Thanks for the helping hand, Arow.

I 'apt-get removed' linux-headers-2.6.16-2-amd64-k8 and
linux-headers-2.6.16-2.

I re-installed them with 'apt-get install' and attempted
'make menuconfig' from /usr/src/linux.

Unfortunately, I received the same error message.
Okay, I'm stuck. The reason I was doing the re-compile was to change some settings in order to make installing the debian packages of the Nvidia drivers for my GeForce 7600 GT less painful. Now, I cannot use 'make' to re-compile the kernel, which I see as a much graver issue.

I'm going to install pine so that I can email any log files, etc., to my work PC to post here. Arow, or any other kind soul, what log files would help in figuring out my next step forward? A dumb idea just occurred to me that maybe ncurses isn't installed? Anyway, thank you in advance.

Why don't you download the kernel files directly from kernel.org? Maybe when somebody built the debian package they missed something? Are you sure you have all of the kernel build tools as well?

Nope, I'm not sure at all that I've got all the tools I need installed.

That's why I mentioned I wasn't even sure if ncurses was installed.

I'll google the info to try to make sure I've got what I need in order to compile, but if you have a list that you believe is useful, please include it here. Thank you for your reply.

With Debian you should definitely use the "Debian way" of compiling the kernel. You can use it whether you use Debian kernel sources or sources from kernel.org. It goes like this:

aptitude install kernel-package
cd /usr/src/linux
make-kpkg clean
make menuconfig
make-kpkg --append-to-version "whateveryouwant" kernel_image

Then, if you have some downloaded modules in /usr/src/modules, do a

make-kpkg --append-to-version "thesameasabove" modules_image

Then do

cd /usr/src
dpkg -i your_kernel_image.deb your_modules_image.deb

I use this on _all_ my Debian/Ubuntu computers and it saves lots of trouble especially with packages that have dependencies on some specific kernel versions.