The testsuite for GCC in this chapter is considered critical. Do not skip it under any circumstances. This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend unsetting or modifying them when building GCC. This time we will build both the C and the C++ compiler, so you'll have to unpack the GCC-core and the GCC-g++ tarball -- they will unfold into the same directory. You should likewise extract the GCC-testsuite package. The full GCC package contains even more compilers. Instructions for building these can be found at . patch -Np1 -i ../gcc-&gcc-version;-no_fixincludes-2.patch patch -Np1 -i ../gcc-3.3.1-suppress-libiberty.patch The second patch here suppresses the installation of libiberty from GCC, as we will use the one provided by binutils instead. GCC's installation documentation recommends to build the package in a dedicated directory separate from the source tree. Create this build directory and go there: mkdir ../gcc-build cd ../gcc-build Now prepare GCC for compilation: ../gcc-&gcc-version;/configure --prefix=/usr \     --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix \     --enable-__cxa_atexit --enable-clocale=gnu \     --enable-languages=c,c++ The meaning of the new configure options: --enable-threads=posix: This enables C++ exception handling for multi-threaded code. --enable-__cxa_atexit: This option will result in C++ shared libraries and C++ programs that are interoperable with other Linux distributions. --enable-clocale=gnu: There is a risk that some people will build ABI incompatible C++ libraries if they didn't install all of the glibc localedata. Using --enable-clocale=gnu ensures that the "right thing" is done in all cases. If you don't wish to use this option, then at least build the de_DE locale. When GCC finds this specific locale, then the correct locale mode (gnu) is implemented. Compile the package: make Test the results, but don't stop at errors (you'll remember the few known ones): make -k check And install the package: make install Some packages expect the C PreProcessor to be installed in the /lib directory. To honor those packages, create this symlink: ln -s ../usr/bin/cpp /lib Many packages use the name cc to call the C compiler. To satisfy those packages, create a symlink: ln -s gcc /usr/bin/cc