Ok, with some help (thanks Patrick) I was able to get past a few problems in trying to get a program to compile. I was able to connect to the CVS server for this packet sniffing program. For the past two days I've tried to figure this out to no avail. I tried searching Altavista and Google for similar errors to see what fixes were tried. No go, so ... libEQ.a: could not read symbols: File format not recognized collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [showeq] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/showeq-2.1.2/src' make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/showeq-2.1.2' make: *** [all-recursive-am] Error 2 I tried redownloading both the tar.gz file (since one of the developers noticed a problem if Winzip was used) and the cvs version (to different directories) and both end with this error. The file is present, it is not in source format, just the archive format (I think that is what .a files are). So ..., Any clue. ------------------------------------------------------- "Intel giveth and Microsoft Taketh Away" - Gordon Moore