Argh. So I reinstalled the whole bloody thing. Thsi time I told it to go only to cylinder 1024 (the old disk has 1046 cylinders) and unmounted the dos partition before updating the db. It seemed happy, except that, for some reason, the DOS partition is mounted read-only. Even if I explicitly tell it to mount rw, it mounts ro. Bah. So I just guess that there's something fubar with that partition. THe rest of it appears to be fine. So I made sure to install all the gcc stuff, and the c compiler *still* doesn't work. I still get the error 'cannot create executables.' I'm attempting to install ssh-1.2.27 from source. Could *that* be the trouble? I have openssh rpm's, and rpm'ing them tells me I don't have all the required libraries, which include esound, gtk, and something else X-ish. I didn't install any of them for a reason: I'm never running an X server on this computer, and I'm sure I don't wnat to. It's a 486 with 24 MB ram and about 500 MB of hard disk space. I also have no mouse for it. Anyway. THis is my predicament. Any more ideas? Conni about ready to just kick the stupid thing and have done with it. -- You can't kill me. I have a cat. http://www2.one-eyed-alien.net/~ccovingt http://www.angelfire.com/anime/Galadriel