diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index 352eabc..b6fb701 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -256,6 +256,10 @@ Corrections:
 
 	Fixed the end-close option, it just did not work.
 
+	In configure.ac was a direct call to gcc instead of $CC which broke
+	cross compiling.
+	Thanks to Fergus Dall for sending a patch.
+
 Coding:
 	Introduced groups_t instead of uint32_t, for more flexibility.
 
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 1107e5d..aa3c84d 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ fi
 # find out which defines gcc passes to cpp, so makedepend does not run into
 # (harmless) "error architecture not supported"
 AC_MSG_CHECKING(which defines needed for makedepend)
-__cpp_defs=`gcc -v -E - </dev/null 2>&1 |$FGREP -e '/cpp ' -e '/cc1 '`
+__cpp_defs=`$CC -v -E - </dev/null 2>&1 |$FGREP -e '/cpp ' -e '/cc1 '`
 SYSDEFS=`aa=; for a in $__cpp_defs
 	do case "$a" in -D*) aa="$aa $a";; esac; done; echo "$aa"`
 AC_SUBST(SYSDEFS)