My friend has recently installed the latest version of Feather linux on his old computer. It works fine, but is lacking any compiling tools, like gcc, make, ect... I've never had to deal with installing those before, and the only help I can find on the internet involves using "apt-get". However, he doesn't have the internet.

Where can I get these tools and how can I install them?

Apt-get would give you a hand on downloading and installing those packages, but it's just 'one way' of the many possible.

Since the computer doesn't have and internet connection, you can try to install them from the CD of your linux distribution, i don't know much about the distro 'Feather Linux' but i can't believe it doesn't have tools like gcc, make, etc for instalation.

If the CD "try" doesn't work, try downloading the packages from the internet yourself, and giving to your friend in some way.

GCC : http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/
Make : http://www.gnu.org/software/make/make.html

I don't know what you need more, but find a package source repository and download what you need.

Feather is an ultra-light distro, about 60megs total. One of the few things that will run on that archaic PC with a reasonable amount of speed. Anyhow, new problem:

Here's a quote from the begining of the "Build" instructions on GCC install html.
In fact, the command 'make' appears all throughout the build instructions.

I don't have 'make' on the system yet. And of course, since I don't have GCC on my system I can't install 'make' ("/lib/cpp failed the sanity test").

When both require the other to install, how can I get around this?

You'll need to find binary packages. Feather is based off of Knoppix so it will use .deb packages and pkg -i to install. I suggest you look at your /etc/apt/sources.list to see where it is getting the packages from and download the gcc and make packages yourself.