adding informative message when we die because of tools problems changed the tr to a small sed thing in the version c...

Original commit message from CVS:
* adding informative message when we die because of tools problems
* changed the tr to a small sed thing in the version check
(why ? because minor 4-p5 translated to 45 using the tr thing, which
is not what we want.  Hopefully this doesn't break other possibilities)