Too late, it's very unsatisfying when tools that are neede for compiling the kernel are not present as rpms, this makes freemint for the not so skilled user, like me, very intransparent
It's true. Keith and Mark were doing the RPM work now and then but currently it's in a really bad shape. I don't know how much you want to relate your work to RPM-based stuff, perhaps Alan's Gentoo (
http://gentoo.atariforge.org/) could help you here?
can't compile the kernel with the installed tools?
The sad (?) truth is that 90% of people here use cross compilers, so bugs in native builds are harder to spot.
Since Frank has passed, there are no new mintlib or freemint packages in the sparemint repo. I would like to help, but in the moment I ran from one problem in to another.
It's not unsolvable. You don't need to compile stuff like kernel, xaaes, mintlib etc by yourself, everything's available on
freemint.org. If I were you, I'd take a look on Alan's work, Gentoo's packages are more or less only simple tar.gz's, it's very up-to-date and you don't need to mess with RPM crap.
O.K, maybe a dumb question, but where can I find the -O, I thought I will find it in the Makefile bit I can't find it in there.
Easiest you can do is to copy the command, remove (in a text editor, for example) the '-O' and paste it back to the terminal. Then 'make' will see that the binary is already built and will jump to a next step.