John,
Thanks for pointing out that bug, I'll make sure it is fixed in the next version. All of our supported distributions slap some extra strings after the version for example: (gcc version 4.1.0 (SUSE Linux))
Once you have installed NI-KAL 1.3 successfully, then you will probably need to rerun the NI-488.2 installer. You may want to run updateNIDrivers as well. Just to be safe you may want to reboot your machine.
If you have done the steps above, and there is no /dev/nipalk, then you may want to take a look at /etc/init.d/nipal to start your debugging. More then likely some modules are failing to load.
Shawn B.
National Instruments