> > Compile your own and they all do. > This is what came to mind. That is what distro-makers do when they put one together. It makes no sense to go away from a distribution that works well for you overall just for having a specific development tool when there are other ways to deal with it. I will try to offer some more specifics for Brian. The real issue with using your existing distro, or other distro, with such (older) tools pre-loaded is that you can have both library and execution environment conflicts (filenames). What we do at work is to use unix environment modules to handle multiple compiler installations, etc. First, download and build the modules framework from here: http://modules.sourceforge.net Then, get the sources for the particular (open source) compiler you want, or binaries for a compiler that self-installs (Intel's for example). You can make a module for the specific compiler (or build environment) that does not have any conflicts with your existing one. For the Intel compiler it should just be a matter of version used if you want multiple ones installed, and that is because there should be no conflict at execution of the compilation commands. For something like GCC you will have conflicts. That is where you build your compiler from source and use either prefixes or postfixes to separate the binaries from an existing installation (like 'gcc' for example turned into 'my_gcc' using a prefix). I hope this helps. Can you tell us what compiler you are interested in using and what C++ standard specification? (I am curious)