This is something that has been bugging me for a while. To the best of my googling I gather that I'm missing some sort of development library...but I've no idea which one or how to aquire it.

Anyways, the three commands give my newbie self the following outputs when I try to compile a program:

[root@localhost autofw-0.3.1]# ./configure
bash: ./configure: No such file or directory

[root@localhost autofw-0.3.1]# make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.

[root@localhost autofw-0.3.1]# make install
make: *** No rule to make target `install'. Stop.

I'm running Fedora Core, the 2.6.7-1.494.2.2 kernel. If anyone can shed light on this, it'd be much appreciated as this is driving me insane.

whats the ls in that directory you are trying to compile?

Its a firewall proggy. That was just an example that I used. I've tried several programs who's instructions can be summed up as ./configure, make and make install. In each case I recieve the same outputs from those commands.

make sure their is a file called "configure" in the directory you are in.
./configure just means, execute the file named "configure" that is located in my current directory. The error message you are receiving is saying.. "Umm.. WHAT file named 'configure', I don't see any file named 'configure' here.. ???" If configure doesn't work, make and make install won't either. Maybe you are in the wrong directory, or you didn't get the right source tarball?

That's why he wanted to see the response of "ls" for that autofw-0.3.1 directory...

yeah, i should have enclosed the `ls' with punctuation, it may have looked more like a typo than anything else.

Aye, I read your message as "what program are you trying to compile?"

[root@localhost autofw-0.3.1]# ls
AUTHOR autofw.8 daemon.py ifconfig.py NEWS PKG-INFO setup.py
autofw COPYING fw.py netstat.py os README TODO

And beyond this program in specific, I do run into this problem a lot for any program I try to compile

Those look like python scripts.. if so, there is nothing to compile. If you have python installed on your computer, you are probably good to go.. just enter the line:
su - -c './autofw -d'
and it should be running. (note: I'm not familiar with this specific package.. so I might be wrong)

As for the line that says "make install", I don't really know what to think about that. Perhaps the documentation isn't up-to-date? Do you understand what cron/crontab is, and why it's suggesting you add an entry to it?

As to your general issue of having trouble with other programs compiling, when I first installed FC2, it didn't install gcc. If you don't have gcc, you can't compile.

I'm still a linux newb and I'm doing my best to learn it one step at a time, which explains this.

I understand far better now, in that you need a configure script to run. Once again I find that people asking me questions helps me more than giving me an answer. Thank you.

Well, with Python programs, you can do a lot with the setup.py script, like "python setup.py build" and "python setup.py install".