I fix my i386 architecture problems by limiting the architecture to armel. I do not advise this for anyone, but just saying, when iw gave me that ****, I eventually gave up figuring out what the hell it wanted and just made build architecture target "armel" instead of "all". It's one of those "I'll come back to it some day" things for me - it was more important in my eyes to make iw promotable down to extras-testing and extras so users could have a properly fully usable aircrack-ng, than to figure out i386 building issues, since at least aircrack-ng for the N900 wouldn't be likely to be ran on i386. Of course, kernels are a bit more important, and being able to test on a non-armel machine is probably more important.