How would I do the following
a)make a make file to install a completed C++ program
b)Build a GUI
c)To make GUIs work on KDE and Gnome

thats a big question.. here are some short answers

>> a)make a make file to install a completed C++ program
read a tutorial on autoconfig and automake..

>> b)Build a GUI
lots of choices, checkout Qt, wxWidgets, gtk, kde.. etc.

>> c)To make GUIs work on KDE and Gnome
as long as all the runtime libs are available at runtime for the gui tk that you choose then there is nothing special to get it to run on any X manager..

once you have the info for all of them.. make a program, make a gui for it. make a Makefile and install it...

QT would probably be a good place to start...

It helps with the generation of make files with its qmake utility
It has a GUI designer
It will work on both gnome & KDE (I use it under gnome and it was used to develop KDE)
It also uses C++ which was an implied requirement of yours (maybe not but I'll add that anyway!)

graeme.

I would suggest Ultimate++.
1. With Ultimate++ IDE (it's called TheIde) you don't need to worry about makefiles which is a lot of headache for beginners.

2. You wouldn't believe how much faster it compiles than any other toolkit or IDE because of BLITZ technology.

3. Also learning and programming process is faster because requires sometimes nearly half the code you would need with other toolkits.

4. Less headache where you keep your files - it has packages and assemblies.

5. With it you have got all-in-one. IDE, GUI toolkit, libraries with OpenGL, ODBC, MySQL, Oracle, XML, PDF export etc etc. Like a swiss knife for programming. You can compare it only to Microsoft's (tm) Visual Studio (or KDevelop maybe).
I've tried WideStudio (from Japan) but after too many crashes lost patience.

6. WxWidgets technology shares most of Windows MFC problems (you can google to find about them).

7. FOX toolkit was started to be easier and better than Qt... but it doesn't have IDE.

8. There is one of the best comparisons of GUI toolkits at commercial JX GUI toolkit
http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/jx/compare.php
but for some reasons they don't include Ultimate++!

9. Also with Ultimate++ you don't need to worry about if you use some code from it. It has free BSD licence. Just read the licences before you use it...

10. I've installed it on Arch Linux without pacman just by extracting the archive file from upp.sourceforge.net- it has no dependancies. You can build your packages this way for any desktop window manager I guess. I run them on KDE and Xfce4 or just plain X.