I can't tell you why you get errors, while I don't. It could be that I'm being dense and didn't understand your problem. I'm not using Fedora, but I don't see why that would matter. Happy hunting.
I think the gcc headers must play a crucial role here. With Peter's ifdef, the spin_lock error goes away, but I'm getting other errors on the Fedora 9 machine, e.g.: % icpc -c -fPIC -DNDEBUG -O2 -DBOOST_ALL_NO_LIB -DBOOST_PYTHON_SOURCE -I/net/rosie/scratch1/rwgk/hot/boost -Ibase/include/python2.5 /net/rosie/scratch1/rwgk/hot/boost/libs/python/src/exec.cpp /usr/include/c++/4.3.0/x86_64-redhat-linux/bits/c++locale.h(94): error: argument of type "__va_list_tag *" is incompatible with parameter of type "char *" const int __ret = __builtin_vsnprintf(__out, __size, __fmt, __args); ^ compilation aborted for /net/rosie/scratch1/rwgk/hot/boost/libs/python/src/exec.cpp (code 2) This is just to prove that the Intel compiler brings in the gcc headers of the system compiler. What I really wanted is compare gcc 4.3 and Intel C++ OpenMP on the same machine, but I have to give up now since this is turning into a time-consuming project. :-( Ralf