Strace has been ported by Branko Lankester <branko@hacktic.nl> to run on Linux systems. Since then it has been greatly modified by various other people. If you want to compile strace on a Linux system please make sure that you use recent kernel headers. Strace needs those to get the proper data structures and constatns used by the kernel, since these can be different from the structures that the C library uses. Currently you will need at least a 2.2.7 or newer kernel. To complicate things a bit further strace might not compile if you are using development kernels. These tend to have headers that conflict with the headers from libc which makes it impossible to use them. There are three ways to compile strace with other kernel headers: * Specify the location in CFLAGS when running configure CFLAGS=-I/usr/src/linux/include ./configure * you can tell make where your kernel sources are. For example if you have your kernelsource in /usr/src/linux, you can invoke make like this: make CFLAGS="\$CFLAGS -I/usr/src/linux/include" (the extra \$CFLAGS is there to make sure we don't override any CFLAGS settings that configure has found). * you can link /usr/include/linux and /usr/include/asm to the corresponding directories in your kernel source-tree.