Quick build of arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi with crosstool-ng

You might be surprised at how much you have to make to correctly build arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi config based toolchain with crosstool-ng. As you can see examples of many open source projects, the man's work is a rare resource. The result of this economic fact is that the attempt to build configuration arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi is not a simple task and during an operation you can come across many problems. Although I am not afraid of problems and effectively try to fight them and of course sharing the results of my work. My build system parameters:
Debian GNU/Linux wheezy/sid 3.2.0-2-amd64

1. Clone crosstools-ng (you need mercurial)

   hg clone http://crosstool-ng.org/hg/crosstool-ng

2. Create temporary directory and run

   ct-ng arm-unknown-linux-eabi

   choose latest kernel (for me it was 3.2.9)
3. We probably want to change directory to which all stuff will be build (default is $HOME/x-tools):

4. ct-ng menuconfig

   And go to:

   Paths and misc options  ---> (${HOME}/x-tools/${CT_TARGET}) Prefix directory

   Change it according to your needs. Exit end save configuration.
5. Build (number depend on how many command we want to run simultaneously):

   ct-ng build.4

   It can take a lot of time. On my machine with 5k BogoMips it takes over 1h.

Problems that you can encounter:

1. gcj - latest changeset 2916:6f758ed4c0b9 have trouble finding gcj binary, which it show using following message:

   [ERROR]  Missing: 'x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcj' or 
   'x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcj' or 'gcj' : either needed!

   To workaround this install gcj and link binary like this:

   sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcj-4.6 /usr/bin/gcj

2. duma - mentioned changeset also has problem with url to D.U.M.A library, apply below changes to workaround problems:

   --- a/scripts/build/debug/200-duma.sh   Mon Mar 12 21:19:26 2012 +0100
   +++ b/scripts/build/debug/200-duma.sh   Wed Mar 14 20:02:22 2012 +0100
   @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
        # Downloading an non-existing file from sourceforge will give you an
        # HTML file containing an error message, instead of returning a 404.
        # Sigh...
   -    CT_GetFile "duma_${CT_DUMA_VERSION}" .tar.gz http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/duma/
   +    CT_GetFile "duma_${CT_DUMA_VERSION}" .tar.gz http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/duma/duma/2.5.15
        # Downloading from sourceforge may leave garbage, cleanup
        CT_DoExecLog ALL rm -f "${CT_TARBALLS_DIR}/showfiles.php"*
    }
   

3. mawk - if mawk return syntax error like this:

   mawk: scripts/gen-sorted.awk: line 19: regular expression compile failed (bad 
   class -- [], [^] or [)

   It could be fixed in two ways. First is to change line 19 in /path/to/tmp/dir/.build/src/glibc-2.9/scripts/gen-sorted.awk Is:

   sub(/\/[^/]+$/, "", subdir);

   Should be:

   sub(/\/[^\/]+$/, "", subdir);

   Or simply by installing gawk, reconfigure and recompile crosstools-ng.

This was my first post related to linux embedded enviroment. Hope it will be more. Enjoy!