Building kernel on non-Fedora systems

[Denver Gingerich]

The kernel building wiki pages
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Rebuilding_OLPC_kernel and
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Kernel_Building) suggest that the only way
to build an OLPC kernel is using Fedora Core 6 or 7.  This is quite
limiting for people like me who don't use Fedora regularly as we would
have to dual-boot Fedora or install it in a VM just to build kernels,
while most Linux distros are perfectly capable of building a normal
kernel.

Has any work been done on removing the dependency on Fedora Core for
kernel building?  Can someone provide a brief list of the reasons for
this dependency so that those interested in fixing it can do so?

I realize that it would still be necessary to have RPM installed to
create an RPM for quick deployment on an XO, but it should be easy to
at least make the kernel binary and perhaps even the initrd image
without RPM.  Being able to build the kernel binary seems to be
sufficient for most development purposes as a developer could just add
the new binary to /boot and update the /boot/vmlinuz symlink or update
olpc.fth.

Denver