Whenever I try to ./configure any program from source (as root) I get the following message:

....
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cl... no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See 'config.log' for more details.

config.log basically just shows more failed attempts at finding C compilers.

I've seen several other posts around with similar problems, but usually the person fixes the problem by installing gcc and perhaps other packages. However, I have all the development packages available installed from my Suse 9.1 Personal CD, and I've tried countless time to uninstall and reinstall gcc-whatever.rpm from the CD. I also have cpp, libgcc, glibc, and pretty much everything I can find on the CD that sounds like it has to do with C compilation. When I do gcc --version from a terminal (user or root) it says command not found, as if it's not installed.

Needless to say being unable to install from source isn't very fun. Does anyone have any ideas here? I appreciate it.

You may want to do a rpm -qa | grep gcc - This will tell you if it's installed or not.

Also, I think that Suse Personal is basically a basic Linux distro - not really a developer distro (as I said, I only think this is true, can't remember) so gcc mightn't be installed by default...

AMMullan is right, there are no such packages on SuSE 9.1 Personal.

The easiest way to install them ist to add an FTP server to the yast installation sources.

Yast -> Software -> Change Source of Installation

Add -> FTP

Server: ftp.suse.com (better one of it's mirrors )
Directory: pub/suse/i386/9.1 (you need to adjust this if you entered a mirror above)

To install the software, simply choose the 'Install and Remove Software' module.

Thanks guys, I'll try this when I get home after school and work tonight. Most likely though the files will be huge and since I've got dialup (over ICS even) so needless to say downloads are no fun.

I'm guessing these packages will be pretty large, so would someone happen to know what packages I will need so I can download them at a friend's house with broadband? I'm sure YAST online would be much easier, but with dial up (and only one phone line) it would take forever. Thanks a lot.

It's really hard to say, since we don't know the requirements of the software you want to compile. At least you will need make, gcc, glibc and glibc-devel. Then there are other compilers for Java, Fortran and so on. Your software may also require certain libraries that need to be present as the devel packages.

Check the output of ./configure to get an idea of what is required.

gcc-3.3.3-41.i586.rpm is 420 kB
glibc-2.3.3-98.i586.rpm is 1.4 MB
glibc-devel-2.3.3-98.i586.rpm is 6.4 MB
make-3.870-184.i586.rpm is 340 kB
autoconf-2.59-75.i586.rpm is 518 kB
automake-1.8.3-23.i586.rpm is 412kB