On 14/02/2014 6:25 AM, Pierre St-Germain wrote:
I think I made more progress...think it's more glibc problem: On the Platform of the device: /mnt/rwfs # /lib/libc.so.6 GNU C Library stable release version 2.3.5, by Roland McGrath et al.
glibc 2.3.5 is pre Debian 4.0 Etch (Sarge (3.1) or thereabouts). That's beyond ancient.
I had problems like this when hacking around with an old Netgear ReadyNAS Duo. It was even weirder than your ARM device, as it was 32-bit SPARC, and had a modified 2.6.17 kernel that required gcc 3.3 to build. See http://wiki.dietpc.org/wiki/DIET-PC_on_SPARC_ReadyNAS if curious.
For that project, I ended up having to install Debian Sarge (SPARC, in my case) on an emulated QEMU virtual machine from the repo at http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/, and use that to compile stuff. If you intend to augment the existing userspace on this device with newly compiled programs, you'll have probably to do something similar. The Emdebian project will be of no use to you at all, because even the earliest discontinued versions of Emdebian Grip/Crush are more recent than Sarge!
It might theoretically be possible to replace your entire userspace with Emdebian Wheezy-Grip ARMEL and marry it up to the 2.6.27 kernel you presumably have no choice but to use, but as that kernel version is well shy of the version that is intended to accompany Wheezy (3.2) nobody is going to be interested in helping you do it! I expect that even if you miraculously got it to work, a lot of userspace functionality would be broken due to reliance on kernel system calls that don't exist in 2.6.27. Personally, I think that the best that you could hope for is a Debian variant somewhere around the Lenny (5.0) level.