more FC4 woes

2005 Aug 20 at 20:52 » Tagged as :virtualization,

Fedora Core 4 does not install the kernel sources as it should. It' probably time to switch to Debian but in the short term I need to make qemu work but that looks like a lot of hard work.

As for compiling a new version of the kernel from scratch, I have done enough of that in the to be thoroughly sick of it. That's what I ended up doing though. Merely expanding the RPM to install the source is not good enough.

rpm -i kernel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.src.rpm

rpmbuild -bp --target=noarch /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec

There is a more recent version of the kernel but to install that would mean I cannot take any short cuts. In retrospect, I could have used the more recent version anyway because the short cut didn't work. You can see that Fredora is a Red Hat (also known as Red Face) product instead of one that is merely sponsered by Red Face from the fact that the sources were installed in some weird /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.11/linux-2.6.11/ folder.

Created a symbolic link to this wierd folder from /usr/src/linux and then ran the configure script in qemu. As mentioned in a previous post the buggy gcc 4 included in FC4 fails to build qemu (and many other things). So you need to use the -cc=gcc32 flag. But finally the good news is that after many hours of hard work, I have a working version of qmeu + kqemu.