[knc1]

After sleeping on this situation over-night . . .
I decided I would native build (under emulation) the things I want in this new image.

The set-up process:

Ref: https://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatChroot (using: armel / jessie instead of examples)
Requires to build: https://packages.debian.org/jessie/qemu-user-static
Requires to run: binfmt-misc support in host kernel

Spoiler:

~ $ sudo mkdir /var1/ARMel
~ $ sudo chown you:yours /var1/ARMel
~ $ cd /var1
var1 $ sudo qemu-debootstrap --no-check-gpg --arch=armel jessie /var1/ARMel ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian
- - - - -
I: Base system installed successfully.

# 'root' is the only user in the chroot at the moment.
sudo chroot ARMel
root@core2quad:/# mount -t proc proc /proc

# No daemons in the chroot allowed:
root@core2quad:/# echo 'exit 101' > /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
root@core2quad:/# chmod +x /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d

# Fix-up package sources:
root@core2quad:/# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian jessie main
root@core2quad:/# echo 'deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian jessie main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list

# Note: I keep seeing:
# qemu: Unsupported syscall: 374
# but nothing has crashed (yet) - I probably should be running a newer qemu-user-static

# update package database
root@core2quad:/# apt-get update

# fix-up (current only) PS1 (because I have more than one terminal open at a time):
core2quad:/root# PS1='ARMel \h:\w \$ '
ARMel core2quad:/ # 

# make sure packages key-ring is current:
ARMel core2quad:/ # apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
debian-archive-keyring is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

# install the build essentials and a selection of the suggested packages:
ARMel core2quad:/ # apt-get install build-essential gcc-4.9-locales \
  debian-keyring libstdc++6-4.9-dbg autoconf automake libtool flex bison \
  gdb libgcc1-dbg libgomp1-dbg libatomic1-dbg libasan1-dbg libubsan0-dbg \
  ed libterm-readline-gnu-perl libterm-readline-perl-perl libb-lint-perl \
  libcpanplus-dist-build-perl libcpanplus-perl libfile-checktree-perl \
  libobject-accessor-perl

# plus - we will need to be able to create u-boot images:
ARMel core2quad:/ # apt-get install u-boot-tools
ARMel core2quad:/ #

There, that should be a good starting set of 'stuff' .

meanwhile - see just how far I can get building the things I want in my K2-Rescue image.