The compiler used at school is GCC 3.1 I've got 2.96 here on my Red Hat machine. So I downloaded a *.tar.bz2 file of GCC 3.1 and decompressed it. I then configured it, ran 'make bootstrap' (took an hour and a half), then ran 'make install'. Everything went just fine and I received no error messages.

Well, afterwards, at he prompt, I typed $gcc -dumpversion and was still told I was using 2.96. How do I go about making 3.1 the default compiler? Ideally, I'd like to remove all references to 2.96 if I can.

Any help you guys can offer is appreciated.

ok, look up where gcc-3.1 was installed, most probably /usr/local/bin, the original is in /usr/bin, you have 2 options: make your path aware of /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin; second, verify that you have right gcc -
/usr/bin/gcc -dumpversion
/usr/local/gcc -dumpversion
and move the one that returns older version to something benign or remove it completely (mv /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc296 or rm -f /usr/bin/gcc, as I said it's most probably in /usr/bin, then you can create a symink in /usr/bin pointed to the right gcc

also, gcc might very well be CALLD gcc-3.1 or gcc3 or similar. the two versions can very happily live side by side, so they should both be accessible. "gcc" is probably just a symlink to /usr/bin/gcc-2.96 or something...

i got it to work by typing gcc-3.1 on the command line (by itself) then i checked the version and it changed to 3.1 from 2.96.