Greetings all.

I have an embedded x86 machine with a 256 Meg compact flash card as a hard disk, no monitor, no keyboard; I telnet into it for configuration / operation. It is idle most of the time, so I decided to use it as a name server.

The Problem: because of storage limitations gcc is not installed (it uses busybox). So I used my main machine (openSUSE 10.2) to do the make procedure, and installed to the locally mounted cf card with ./configure --prefix=/media/disk/usr/local. When I attempt to run it I get a libc mismatch. It expects libc.2.2.5 but I suspect it was linked with the main machine's native version of libc (libc.3.x...)

I've been reading about using a virtual machine, like UML; if I understand correctly, I could install the version of linux (kernel 2.3.24) which the embedded machine is running, but there is a lot of learning to do and it takes me away from my goal of learning about name servers.

Can you share some ideas?

You will need to install the libraries that the program may link against in SuSE, but take care that those library paths aren't included in /etc/ld.so.conf. But you need to indicate the library paths and include paths for your cross compiling in your make file. If you don't want to install a particular library from source, you might try downloading a package with the library versions you need, and use the unrpm command to extract the lib and include hierarchies of the package inside a directory in your home directory. Then for dynamically linked binaries, you can simply copy them to the embedded device's cf card. You will need to run "sudo /sbin/ldconfig" after installing a new library, inserting the cf card and telneting into the embedded device. You will probably learn more about embedded devices than running a name server. You don't need to use a virtual machine to cross compile.

Thanks for your reply. It seems like the first thing here is to familiarize myself with libraries and the structure of the Makefile. Getting down to it!

There is a book published by Prentice Hall called "Embedded Linux Primer" by Christopher Hallinan that you might be interested in. ISBM 0-13-167984-8