If you install from Subversion, call ./autogen.sh make make install To make a distribution tarball do ./autogen.sh make distcheck See the INSTALL and TROUBLESHOOTING file for more information. Note: If you are building the python bindings, automake-1.9 has some minor improvements over automake-1.7 in the py-compile script used to byte-compile the *.py files. You may change REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION to 1.9 in autogen.sh if you wish. In order to build the python bindings you will have to install the following packages: python (e.g. python2.4) python-dev (e.g. python2.4-dev) python-mutagen