I ran autogen.sh, but it fails with something like this: + running aclocal -I m4 -I common/m4 ... aclocal: configure.ac: 8: macro `AM_DISABLE_STATIC' not found in library aclocal: configure.ac: 17: macro `AM_PROG_LIBTOOL' not found in library aclocal failed What's wrong ? aclocal is unable to find two macros installed by libtool in a file called libtool.m4. Normally this would indicate that you don't have libtool, but that would mean autogen.sh would have failed on not finding libtool. It is more likely that you installed automake (which provides aclocal) in a different prefix than libtool. You can check this by examining in what prefix both aclocal and libtool are installed. You can do three things to fix this : install automake in the same prefix as libtool force use of the automake installed in the same prefix as libtool by using the --with-automake option figure out what prefix libtool has been installed to and point aclocal to the right location by running export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I $(prefix)/share/aclocal" where you replace prefix with the prefix where libtool was installed.