David, It looks like your idea and observation worked, at least in part. I moved my boost sources to the ext3 partition on my external drive and then I ran the following command from the boost_1_33_1 folder: bjam "-sTOOLS=gcc" install but...it looks like it compiled it and placed the header files in a boost folder that I was running it from and not in /usr/local where the default location should be. So when I run scons to compile ardour2, (a music editing program), it says the boost header files can not be found and are not installed. So....can I re-run the bjam command with the prefix option? bjam "-sTOOLS=gcc" --prefix=/usr/localinstall (would this be the correct syntax?) Or would that create other link problems since I already compiled it? douglas