I have been trying to compile the paramtest1.s example in chapter 11 with _start changed to main with gcc version 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4) and have always got a segmentation fault. Using the commands as -g -o paramtest1.o paramtest1.s and
ld -dynamic-linker /lib/ld-linux.so.2 -lc -o paramtest1 paramtest1.o
everything works as expected. What is needed to make this work as a static executable?

On Ubuntu 7.04 default install I got this to work with:

gcc -static /usr/lib/crtn.o -lc paramtest1.s

gcc version is 4.4.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4)