First I thought this was a problem caused by the SUN as, but then I installed the GNU as, and typed "make clean; rm config.cache; configure && make depend && make" but the problem remained.
I suspect that the problem is that gcc is still invoking 'as' instead of 'gas'. My understanding is the only clean way to get gcc to use the GNU binutils is to rebuild it with such support.
What we've done is very hackish, but seems to work - place symlinks called 'as', 'cc', and 'ld' that point to the respective GNU tools ahead of the 'normal' SUN tools in the PATH.
HTH
Jer