Challenges compiling GRUB 0.97 / toolchain problems

[Alex Beamish]

Hi folks,

I have a requirement to re-compile GRUB 0.97 in order to track down a
rather tricky boot problem, and getting the tool-chain set up has been a
little challenging. I'm hoping TLUG can help out. (And before anyone says
"Why don't you use GRUB2?", let me just posit that the existing platform
uses GRUB, and that's the problem that I'm trying to solve.) My platform is
Ubuntu 12.04, which I just upgraded this weekend from 11.04. I am building
a 32-bit version of GRUB on a 32-bit platform, so there shouldn't be any
cross-compilation issues.

I downloaded GRUB 0.97, ran ./configure and was told

   GRUB requires a working absolute objcopy; upgrade your binutils

Binutils was already at 2.22-6ubuntu1, which had arrived as part of my
lengthy upgrade to 12.04. So I found the appropriate package at gnu.org,
2.23.2, and built that and installed it.

I ran the ./configure for GRUB 0.97 again, and this time it said

   C compiler cannot create executables

and referred me to the config.log. That turned out to be a problem with the
command 'gcc -V', whose output displeases ./configure. So I went off to
find the appropriate package at gnu.org, and the ./configure for that
failed with the now familiar

   C compiler cannot create executables

So this appears to leave me at an impasse. I'm guessing that this error
message is code for some other problem, but I don't have much experience
compiling C on the Linux platform.

I got to this place because I'm getting a GRUB error 21 when re-booting
some custom software; instrumenting GRUB seems to be the best approach to
this, since the disk and file-system (that's what error 21 is complaining
about) seem to be fine when mounted on another system. GRUB stage 1.5
appears to work fine, and just at the point that the menu is about to
appear, I get the Error 21.

Thanks everyone!

Alex Beamish

PS I posted this tool-chain question on Freenode's #gnu channel last night,
and I got a vague reply -- I got the suggestion 'Have you tried compiling
your programs 'the ubuntu way'?". If anyone can explain or decode that, I'd
appreciate hearing from you.
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