My computer is 2.5 gigahertz, 256M ram and HD space of 10 gig. Installation of my Mandrake distribution was pretty quick. It's really old (Mandrake 7.2 - 2.2.17 kernel) I got through binutils fast (beginning of chapter 5). gcc is a problem again. The computer will 'make bootstrap' and even 'make install' but now I get this message when I try to get the version number of the new gcc. I type 'gcc --version'. And it types 'gcc: error in loading shared libraries: libgcc_s.so.1: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory'. If I go to /tools/lib the file seems to be there. I'm still stuck on gcc-4.0.3.(!!) I think I got the config flags right... '--enable-shared' and all. Any help would be apreciated.

Looks like a bug in the book. It lists 2.95.3 as minimum gcc version for the host system, but versions older than 3.0 (IIRC) don't include libgcc_s.so. Because packages compiled before the "Adjusting the Toolchain" step use libraries from the host system, the library is not found. This could be solved by adding /tools/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and then running ldconfig, but that old system is likely to cause other problems later in the build. Note that the minimum host kernel requirement of LFS is 2.6. You really should install a more modern host distro or use the LFS LiveCD as host.

Thanks alot. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I appreciate the help... I may try editing ld.so.conf and see after that how long I can follow the book untill the next crisis. Quick question: ldconfig takes the name of the library as a parameter, right? you would type 'ldconfig libgcc_s.so' or do I have the command or library name wrong? Do you run ldconfig on any file that is effected after a change to ld.so.config? Thanks again.

Thanks again. I figured out 'ldconfig'. It takes a directory. I edited ld.so.conf and ran ldconfig and now, if the PATH is set right, I get the response I want from 'gcc --version'. Thanks.