lemming:
I took the bold move, manned up and tried your suggestion. Had permission problems so I changed directory to the hardware/tools/avr/bin and sudo-ed the command to overcome the problem:sudo rm -rf /
to remove the contents of the directory but it came up with error messages, hung the PC and now it won't reboot!
How do I reverse this change?
I really hope you aren't serious...but part of me thinks you are...sigh.
Regarding your original issue (and if anyone knows better - please correct me) - the reason the avr-gcc used by the Arduino system is older than the "system supplied" one (by a lot) is because later versions broke something somewhere (with avr libc? or something) - and at any rate, it won't compile things properly, and it hasn't been patched (after all this time - no idea why) to fix it.
So - if you really b0rk3d your system - you did it for no good reason at all.
