Install GCC

GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection. The latest version is GCC 4.3. The use of this tutorial is to install GCC 4, which is not available in some linux distributions. In those systems GCC 3 is available instead but I suppose that for some reason you need GCC 4. (Of course we will use GCC 3, or any other available C compiler to build GCC 4.) The tutorial is focused in obtaining 'g++' (GNU C++) among all the available compilers in the collection. This tutorial is based on this other guide.

You can check which version of GCC is currently installed by running

 $gcc -v
 ...
 gcc version 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-3)

Preparation

The tutorial assumes that you want to install GCC/g++ in your userspace directories (i.e. in your home directory).

Download the sources to a local directory:

 mkdir ~/soft
 cd ~/soft
 wget http://gcc.releasenotes.org/releases/gcc-4.3.3/gcc-g++-4.3.3.tar.gz
 tar -zxvf gcc-g++-4.3.3.tar.gz

Also you will need the GMP library whose development (sources) are not installed in general (and in particular not in wcr). In normal cases I would give the instructions to compile and install GMP here but fortunately you can just put the GMP source inside GCC sources and that will allow to compile both at the same time.

 cd ~/soft
 wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gmp/gmp-4.2.4.tar.gz
 tar -zxvf gmp-4.2.4.tar.gz
 mv gmp-4.2.4/* gcc-4.3.3/

Compilation

Everything will be installed in ~/usr, including the executable compilers in ~/usr/bin and the library files in ~/usr/lib. To specify that you do

 cd ~/usr/gcc-4.3.3-build
 ../gcc-4.3.3/configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --with-local-prefix=$HOME/usr/local
 

It is important to check that the configure works (if it doesn't report it in this wiki) before doing

 make

Then

 make test-g++

to test that the compilation was succesfull and then do the final install:

 make install