> It turns out that I needed libc 5.4.17 to compile Linux 2.1.21! > Unfortunately, I was not able to compile libc 5.4.17 with a libc 5.3.7 > system! This is not good.
You can compile Linux 2.1.21 happily with out of the box redhat which is libc5.3.12 - so its something else