I have mandrake 9.0 installed on my machine and gnu version of c++ by default on the install was 3.2.2 or 3.2 or higher or whatever. Well what hte problem is that if the version is greater than 3.2 then its not compatible with the other versions which i need to have compatibility with. So the question is how do i revert back from g++ 3.2.2 to g++ 3.1.1 or g++ 3.0 or so, because all the resources that i've found thus far have been cryptic and not very useful, i'd appreciate the help, thanks

I believe you can download the source for the older version and compile it in its own directory and make install to a directory with its own version number and use both. I've never done it so couldn't tell you precisely how, but I know that's one way to do it. And maybe a pre-compiled version would just install like that. And there may even be a switch or flag or whatever to run the new compiler to be backwards compatible.

Hopefully somebody else can give better answers but it might help if you hinted what the cryptic suggestions were so people could clear them up or suggest something different rather than being cryptically suggestive in the same way.

the directions for installing the stuff from gnu refer to places like gccsrcdir, libbuilddir, libsrcdir etc. but i'm not sure if these directories are arbitrary and user defined or if they have a specific place. I've also tried running some of the commands given without success.

I don't *think* the directories especially matter, though you may have to define them for compiling. But I think it's supposed to be a more or less temporary place. The results will go to the respective places. And I don't believe those directories would already exist on your system.

It's not exactly relevant, but might happen to say something that would help - http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/view/4.0/ - that has two sections on compiling and installing GCC and may reference in the first few sections as well. It's about 3.2 but it may apply to getting an older one on as well.

Wish somebody who'd done it would post - I *know* people around here have compiled it.