Trouble with genattr and 1.0.2 under linux

[Phil Romig <romig at bierstadt dot unl dot edu>]

I'm trying to build 1.0.2 under linux (libc ver 5, kernel ver 2.0.31).

I have encountered a couple of problems.  

1) configure can't guess what kind of system I have.  I supplied
   "i586-pc-linux" and that seemed to make it happy.  However I suspect
   my other problem is related to a bad configuration.
   
2) During the build, I get errors when it tries to use genattr and
   cpp.  Both errors are the same:
   
     make[2]: Entering directory /usr/dist/src/egcs-build/gcc'
     ./genattr ../../egcs-1.0.2/gcc/config/i386/i386.md > tmp-attr.h
     /bin/sh: ./genattr: No such file or directory
     
  But oddly enough genattr does exist:
  
    [root@bierstadt egcs-build]# ls -l egcs-build/gcc/genattr
    -rwx------ 1 root root 69587 Mar 27 10:05 egcs-build/gcc/genattr
    
  So I say to myself, "self I say: must be a library problem, try removing
  the file to be sure it is using libraries we have."  Which I do, and that
  fixes the problem until the next time ./cpp (i.e. cccp) is needed.  
  Then I get the same error for cpp, and I fix that by removing cccp and
  the build starts again.  
  
  However this is the third time I've gone through this process and I'm
  starting to suspect that these programs depend on each other, because
  I still have not made it to the stage1 compiler yet.
  

Any hints/suggestions/similar experiences?

thanks
Phil
romig@cse.unl.edu