Maximum PC

10? 30?

Well, obviously you still have some pretty basic bugs in that 10+ year old stuff. Upgrade it man! There is nor reason not to. It isn't like it costs money

Besides, just because something still "works" doesn't mean that the newer stuff isn't lots better.

Yeah .. not like, say, file systems have seen any improvements over the last decade or so.

SunOS 5.10 is Solaris 10; You're actually working on a recent enough system. The native IDE and C/C++ compiler for Solaris is actually a damn good compiler (SunStudio).

It sounds like the sysadmin may have borked the g++ install. What version of g++ is installed on the machine?
What university is this?

Most people got wise to it pretty fast, but you always had one or two people that were stubborn. The reverse situation actually happen to me once. I was taking a course with one of the professors that I worked for at the time (indirectly, but she acted like she owned everyone in the department). We had to simulate a memory manager for an OS course; Her directions were very clear about compiling all code on the Unix box. I get back a hard-copy of the code and the top of the paper has a comment like... "Excellent design -- best in the class!" and a little below it is a BIG D- or F and a little below that a comment about my code not compiling! I knew that my code compiled and worked. I had spent the better part of the previous two weeks making sure that it was A+ quality. It turns out that this grader had moved all of the submissions from the Unix box and then used VS to compile and test the programs! You should have seen the look on his face when we started questioning him about how he had tested the code -- that was one scarred 19 or 20 year old.

Of course they've changed during the past ten years! Solaris 10 introduced a number of new operating system features. C++ compilers and tools have changed substantially. And Emacs, well Emacs was built for the ages, but even it has changed. =)

g++ 3.4.6

and its Kutz*town University, in Pennsylvania