killed my old kernel (and machine)

I was doing some housekeeping to save space and thought "I know I'll be clever and uninstall all the kernel 2.4.xx packages to save space, after all I'm using 2.6.4 now so I shouldn't need any of it"

now I can't ./configure anything and I can't do any make menuconfig for kernel compiles I tried re-installing the packages but it doesn't seem to help. Do I need to re-install from scratch?

I get the following error when trying ./configure

checking if the linker (/usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld) is GNU ld... yes
checking for /usr/i486-slackware-linux/bin/ld option to reload object files... -                                            r
checking for BSD-compatible nm... /usr/bin/nm -B
checking whether ln -s works... yes
checking how to recognise dependent libraries... pass_all
checking how to run the C preprocessor... /lib/cpp
configure: error: C preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check
See `config.log' for more details.

root@neo:/usr/src/linux# ls /var/log/packages/ | grep gcc
gcc-3.3.3-i486-1
gcc-g++-3.3.3-i486-1
gcc-g77-3.3.3-i486-1
gcc-gnat-3.3.3-i486-1
gcc-java-3.3.3-i486-1
gcc-objc-3.3.3-i486-1


root@neo:/usr/src/linux# ls /var/log/packages/ | grep g++
gcc-g++-3.3.3-i486-1


What do you have?

That's not a kernel-related error... at least not from my experience.

I'd suggest you check whether you've installed GCC. It seems that this is your problem.

maybe you just need to upgrade --reinstall your gcc* packages

I got frustrated and re-installed everything (I needed to do it anyway at some point to get rid of my old SuSE install that was eating up all my space).

I reckon re-installing gcc might have worked, guess I'll never know now - and I don't plan on ever deleting the kernel packages again

Hey just be logic, if you boot without any problem and just fail on compile, why think that the problem come from kernel?

I didn't think the problem came from the kernel, i thought it came from me deleting the kernel headers that are used for compiling against (the packages kernel-sources.tgz)

try the gcc.3.3.3 pkg, I succed in compiling kernel for the first time (and at the first try!) with gcc3.xx series (before I had to use the 2.95 to do the job)