error in configure

[Brian]

first of all I can't figure out how to run configure without having to
type sh ./configure it gives me an incorrect interpreter error.

When I do run i with sh ./configure I get an error message:

checking whether setvbuf arguments are reversed... configure: error: can
not run test program while cross compiling

If I comment out the line in the configure.in that cases this error, it
will go through configure, and then when I run make it comes up with
errors. One of them is that it can't run missing. So I edit the Makefile
and put 'sh' before the missing calls and it runs make, but then the make
executable that is created is foobared, prints out gibberish.
this is with make-3.79.1, I also tried it with 3.79 + 3.78 + 3.76, they
all do roughly the same thing.

-Brian