If you want to hack a gimp plugin based on the gimp-plugin-template package, it will make you life easier to have the following packages installed: - GNU autoconf >= 2.54 - GNU automake >= 1.7 These should be available by ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu or any of the fine GNU mirrors. Beta software can be found at alpha.gnu.org. If you are accessing gimp-plugin-template via CVS, then you will need to take several steps to get it to compile. You can do all these steps at once by running: ./autogen.sh Basically this does the following for you: aclocal; automake; autoconf The above commands create the "configure" script. Now you can run the configure script to create all the Makefiles. Before running autogen.sh or configure, make sure you have libtool in your path. Also make sure gimp-2.0.m4 is in the same --prefix relative to your automake installation. Note that autogen.sh runs configure for you. If you wish to pass options like --prefix=/usr to configure you can give those options to autogen.sh and they will be passed on to configure.