[ydl-gen] ./configure problems

[Nicholas S-A]

hello,
    I am trying to build various pieces of open source software that use 
configure scripts. I execute the script, and it gives the following output:

> checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
> checking whether build environment is sane... configure: error: ls -t 
> appears to fail.  Make sure there is not a broken
> alias in your environment
> configure: error: newly created file is older than distributed files!
> Check your system clock
> ./configure: line 70: 15277 Segmentation fault      sed -n 
> "s/^\\([_$as_cr_alnum]*_cv_[_$as_cr_alnum]*\\)=\\(.*\\)/\\1=\\2/p"

It has given these errors for all of the configure scripts I have 
successfully run. I am using NTP with time.redhat.com as my server, so I 
am pretty sure that the problem is not that the time is wrong (In fact, 
for one piece of software the last modification time was august 2005.) 
When I run ls -t, it appears to work, e.g. it organizes the files based 
on the modification time given by ls -l. I was wondering if anyone knew 
of a fix for this problem, or something else that I can do.
uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.10-1.ydl.1 #1 Tue Feb 8 10:24:20 MST 
2005 ppc ppc ppc GNU/Linux

> # cat /proc/cpuinfo
> processor       : 0
> cpu             : 7455, altivec supported
> clock           : 800MHz
> revision        : 2.1 (pvr 8001 0201)
> bogomips        : 798.32
> machine         : PowerBook3,4
> motherboard     : PowerBook3,4 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh
> detected as     : 73 (PowerBook Titanium III)
> pmac flags      : 0000001b
> L2 cache        : 256K unified
> memory          : 512MB
> pmac-generation : NewWorld

I am using pretty much a completely untouched install, having only 
successfully added apt-RPM, sbcl, and firefox-ppc.

I am also haing trouble with modules utilities. lsmod, insmod, rmmod, 
and modprobe do not appear to exist. neither do ifconfig, ifup, or 
ifdown. I was wondering if there are specific packages that I need to 
install to have those utilities.

thanks,
nicholas