I've just moved house last week so don't have too much time to look at this at the moment.
It looks like your issue is with awk in building the C libraries. I build on Debian, although unstable rather than Etch, but I don't think awk should be too different. For reference
nick:~> which awk
/usr/bin/awk
nick:~> awk --version
GNU Awk 3.1.5
Alternatively, you could skip the building from source and just try taking apart the benchmark CD image and then rebuilding it from the binaries and libraries that are in the image. You may have to rebuild busybox and set CONFIG_FEATURE_WGET_LONG_OPTIONS=y in busybox-1.2.0/.config to get it to honour the proxy, I don't know - I've not played with proxies and busybox executables.