well, i got the whole source tarball. and then i ran ./configure.

well'll i'm getting messages like
bad interpreter command not found.
./config.sub not found - its there in the directory

what does a message like that mean [bad interpreter?]
/bin/sh and /bin/bash are all working well enough.

you could try doing "sh configure" instead of "./configure", maybe the configure file does not tell the computer to use /bin/sh for interpretting.

well, i figured out what was happening. i'd downloaded the tarball and unzipped on a fat32 drive. turns out you're not supposed to do this [<i>why?</I>]. then i unzipped on to a linux drive and tried it and then it worked.

but then well i built it, did something like configure, then make bootstrap and then make install. but well, it doesn't seem to get rid of my old gcc. i finish doing everything and then run

gcc --version

and i get the same old version [2.96 instead of 3.2.1]
how do i get it replace my old gcc?

You aren't supposed to use a fat32 drive because it doesn't preserve things like permissions and the "x bit" (which designates a file as executable).

It may have installed to a different place. When running make install, try to see where it's copying the new binary to. Do 'which gcc' to see where your current version is (that is, the one that is invoked by searching the path). If they're not the same, you'll have to re-configure it with the prefix option (that's how it usually is): ./configure prefix=/usr/local where /usr/local is the path where you want it installed to.

- taubz