I'm not on the list so if you know what's wrong here dont forget to cc me. I'm using debian unstable and have compiled gimp many times before. For the past few weeks, however, i've been getting this error. pkg-config is found so it seems like there is a problem with automake. i've rerun autogen.sh and i dont get any unusual errors. I'll add that to the bottom of the mail. I'm using automake (GNU automake) 1.4-p4 and Autoconf version 2.13 . Any other info needed? -- Errors from running configure configure.in:46: AC_PROG_CPP was called before AC_PROG_CC checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config ./configure: line 8536: syntax error near unexpected token `AM_PATH_GTK_2_0(1.3.7,,' ./configure: line 8536: `AM_PATH_GTK_2_0(1.3.7,,' Now type 'make' to compile GIMP. -- autogen.sh output warnings. Adding an entry to po/ChangeLog (backup is in po/ChangeLog~) Please add the files codeset.m4 gettext.m4 glibc21.m4 iconv.m4 isc-posix.m4 lcmessage.m4 progtest.m4 from the /usr/share/aclocal directory to your autoconf macro directory or directly to your aclocal.m4 file. You will also need config.guess and config.sub, which you can get from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/config/.