Comment 129 for bug 1220146

@David (and everybody else who is having the same problem): I was able to recreate your error. I don't know what caused this, but I found a way to prevent it. I also had a fresh install of 14.4 but of Kubuntu (but I hope this shouldn't matter in this context). When I first tried to run make, I got an error telling me that gcc was missing, so I just installed it directly, without anything else, like build-essentials. After that it build and installed correctly. So the obvious other step that you did was installing build-essentials et al. So I installed them and tried to run make again, and got the same error as you did. So I removed those packages again and it worked again. Somehow one of those other packages causes the error. I don't know why but for now this is not important to me. Anyway ...

Long story short: try this:
(start with a fresh directory, just to be sure)
sudo apt-get remove -y build-essential kernel-package libncurses5-dev bzip2
sudo apt-get install gcc

and then do all the other steps from my previous post.

If you want to you can install the removed packages afterwards again, if you need them for any other project.
I hope this helps.
Cheers
  Frog23