Ok,
hooray Scott; I finally managed to build a image ,flashed it on my vim pro , booted and loged in as scott/ttosc
thanks a lot;
my initial goal was 1st to build a leaner image (without mate, but i failed to put aside xorg & co so the build time was still a few hours)
I tried on 3 computers : 2 with bodhi linux 3 (kernel 3.14 + buntu 14.04.5 LTS based) and one with xubuntu 16.10 with various mileages and the following blocking error to build u-boot on the 16.10 box;
... CC dvfs.o
CC lib/delay.o
CC task_entry.o
CC misc.o
In file included from uart.c:2:0:
/usr/lib/gcc/arm-none-eabi/4.9.3/include/stdint.h:9:26: fatal error: stdint.h: No such file or directory
# include_next <stdint.h>
^
compilation terminated.
Makefile:84: recipe for target '/home/raxy/project/khadas-build-script/Khadas-Components/u-boot/build/scp_task/uart.o' failed
make[2]: *** [/home/raxy/project/khadas-build-script/Khadas-Components/u-boot/build/scp_task/uart.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
/home/raxy/project/khadas-build-script/Khadas-Components/u-boot/Makefile:896: recipe for target 'bl301.bin' failed
make[1]: *** [bl301.bin] Error 2
Makefile:147: recipe for target 'sub-make' failed
make: *** [sub-make] Error 2
(0x05)##############################
(0x05) END: compile_firmware_u-boot
(0x05)##############################
finally the slowest/smallest of the bodhi machines did the trick;
now trying to understand how to cleanly build a proper lean distro, and later, experiment w/ mate.