beats me why it fails! ... Well, I don't really know the reason. I use Ubuntu Hardy Heron with gcc 4.2.3 ... This is the configure command I used (after installing the packages for JPEG, TIFF and PNG). A lot of this is really customized for my use of ImageMagick and u may not need it ...
./configure --enable-shared=yes --disable-static –-without-perl --with-freetype –with-gs-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts LDFLAGS=’-L/usr/local/lib –Wl,-rpath,/usr/local/lib’ > config.result