I recently installed Fedora Core 3 and tried to compile the grub package for L4 using gcc 3.4.2

don't use gcc 3.x to compile Grub. It has many things that aren't supported in earlier versions like strings in printfs scattered through several lines. My advice to you is use gcc 2.95. Also check if you have ncurses installed in your system. Use synaptic ;). It's easier.