Ubuntu – Old version of gcc for new Ubuntu

You might have trouble compiling new kernels with very old versions of GCC.

Besides that, no, GCC versions are not tied to the Linux kernel's version:

• You can run an ancient GCC version on a system with a new kernel.
• You can run a new GCC version on a system with a very old kernel. The only thing that would stop you from doing this would be if your new GCC version requires a version of libc that will not run on that kernel. But this is not a particularly likely scenario.

With that said, you should be careful about installing an older GCC over a newer GCC, since the newer GCC may be needed. If you're building GCC yourself from source, you can configure the build to install in its own prefix (rather than /usr). If this still breaks builds, make sure the newer GCC (which was there before) is in a directory earlier in the PATH environment variable than the older GCC (which you more recently installed).

If you do not have SVN install it with

sudo apt-get install svn

Then run the following command and it will download the source for gcc 4.1.2 into a subdirectory of the current working directory.

svn co svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/tags/gcc_4_1_2_release gcc

Then follow the official gcc build guide