If you want an alternative program to view DICOM files check out Debian's neuro science repository. You can add it with the instructions here.

I see that this guy used dcm2niigui to convert DICOM files to convert them to the Nifty file format (*.nii) and then opened them in MRICron.

They manage with portage. It does the heavy lifting in terms of sorting out the various build dependencies. You are doing everything by hand, so "I do not know how LFS users manage" would have been a more appropriate comment.

That said, they key is time and patience and/or being open to alternative options.

libqt4-qt3support is already installed. Moreover, according to the thread you pointed out, there will be problems even after the configure stage.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...issues-908486/
I think I will stop trying further on this package. Thanks for your help.

Thanks for the Debian's neuro science repository and dcm2niigui link.

Gentoo' portage sounds like Arch linux's yaourt package manager which downloads sources and compiles and install them locally. But manual intervention is needed very often. Filling dependencies by hand reminds me of my short time with slackware. I think Debian is overall the best distribution for a stable, long term use.

Actually it is generally much easier to compile stuff 'manually' on Slackware because the recommended install (full) includes a nice, wide range of development libs, so many apps simply compile without having to hunt down anything. It is one of the reasons Slackware is my favourite distro, it makes stuff like this easy. I certainly favour it to Debian or any of its derivatives.

One thing that I found difficult to handle in Slackware were different releases/versions. I had to be careful that programs were for 13.1 and not 12.2, etc. With Debian-testing, I hope to just keep doing regular updates and there is no need to bother about versions. This is basically an advantage of rolling release distribution.

Another advantage seems to be that most software authors provide a Debian/Ubuntu/Mint version of the software, or rpm versions which also can be used in Debian; Slackware and Arch versions are less often provided.