I'm installing gcc-4.0.3 on LFS, first pass. That's the beginning of chapter 5. I've got an old Dell L400c, Pentium 3, 400MHZ, 31M RAM. I get to 'make bootstrap' and my installation hangs after the first 2 and 1/2 hours. I can leave it there for hours and nothing happens. The last thing on the screen is a command involving 'insn-attrtab.o' - I've done this 3 times and it always stops there. If I just 'make' without the bootstrap part, the whole thing completes in a little over an hour. The kernel on the machine is 2.2.17. It's an old Mandrake distro. Is my situation hopeless? Can I get LFS to work? Can I move on to the next step without 'make bootstrap' ? What is 'insn-attrtab.o' ?

Hm, I think one reason why you can't bootstrap gcc could be that you run out of memory (31 Megs are not very much...). Another reason could be that the gcc version on your old mandrake installation is too old (could you maybe tell us what version the host gcc is?).

Further it's important to use "make bootstrap" to ensure that you temporarely toolchain is sane. More details about the bootstrap off gcc can be found in the LFS text.

HTH

Hello, radiodee1
Let me put it this way:
1. 'make bootstrap' is important [see krigav above or the manual], however it is not compulsory. You could do well without it, but it's risky(!). It something goes wrong, it can show up at any stage, and you'll have to start from the very beginning.
2. You could enable a swap partition on your hard drive. It will definitely slow the process down, but at least it should push the process.
3. Don't ask about '*.o' [object] files here. If you need to know it, try to ask in Programming forum.

Good luck!!!
P.S.: If it was helpful, don't forget to post a reply.

well gcc is version 2.95.3. I don't know what to do, really. I don't want to move on and sabotage myself. I cannot get more ram. What about 'make' and 'make install' gcc, then 'make bootstrap' gcc on top of that? is that sort of thing possible? if it's a ram issue that idea won't remedy the situation, right? I read the book where it describes why the gcc bootstrap option compiles gcc three times. I think my install hangs around the second compilation. maybe i will move on after all.

radiodee1! Going back to my notes above:
1. You can try to do 'make' instead of 'make bootstrap'. Version 2.95.3 is not really old for this.
2. Is/are you hard drive(s) have say some hundred Mbytes of free unneeded space? Do you know what swap partitions are? Do you have any swap partitions on you hard drive(s)? If you have a partition, you have to unable it to get extra memory for compilation! If you have free space, you can create a swap and use it.

Don't give up!!!

well, I checked my swap space and it's 246M. I only have 31M of ram. I always thought you were supposed to have swap space for twice your ram. I checked df and found I had about exactly 512M free on /, but over a gig on /home, so I tried to install the sources on /home/lfs and work the process from there. No luck. The whole thing hung at the same exact time as before. I typed ctrl-z after an hour of waiting and then killed the make that was suspended. I got a message saying, among other things, that I had just killed 'stage2_build'. I should try to find out what 'insn-attrtab.o' is, since it always hangs there... it may not advance my cause to know, but it would be good anyway. Does anyone know where I should go to find out... which forum, etc. Any other suggestions would also be helpfull.

I've got a different solution. I have a different computer. It's 2.5 gigahertz. More ram (256M ram) and HD space (10 gig). Installation of my old Mandrake distribution was pretty quick. I got through binutils fast. gcc is a problem again. This new computer will 'make bootstrap' and even 'make install' but now I have a different problem. 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. Maybe I should put all this in a new thread.