> Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
I'm guessing that you are running out of memory and swap space on the
compilation, but I don't know for sure. Or possibly you have some bad
memory. You shouldn't otherwise be able to crash your machine from a
user process.
Anyway, you might try shutting down X11 (if you are running it), and in
general try to strip the machine bare before doing the compilation. You
might look for a package (port?) to install instead.
- Thomas