./configure make make install
 

I have tried to install a style from kde-look.org with this method, but it doesnt work. I already appended --prefix=/opt/kde3/ to ./configure. The configure command runs fine but when i try to run make, it says command not found. What am i doing wrong?

i now have more information on what i am doing wrong.
First of all, i was trying to compile the theme. The main problem was that i didnt have a compiler installed. I did that with YaST and now I have a new error message. The shell says: checking for X.... configure: error: cannot find X-includes. Please check path!
Now what does that mean?
Help!
Thank you!

well first look in the :
README or INSTALL
files that come packed with the source ...
typically there is both, but you should at least have one ..
these will tell you how to install them ...

i personally can't think of a theme that requires configure, make, make
install ... its usually only theme engines that require this ...

typically you extract whatever type of theme to wherever the themes'
default location is ...
and they supply both KDE and GTK themes on that site, so i can't say
where to put it since you didn't say the type of theme ..
but in any case, you should have just noticed that there is a link called "how to install"
on the theme pages ... and i'll quote one for a kde theme :

Compiling
 

I have now figured out, that the problem lies in compiling the make file. When i run the ./configure command i get the error message:
checking X... configure: error: Cann't find X-Includes. Please check your installations and add correct paths.
What am I supposed to do now? My Distribution is Suse Linux 9.0, but I thought I added that information when I did ./configure --prefix=/opt/kde3 which I was told to add in the README file.
Help!
Thank you!

Don't know/use KDE but do you have the xfree development package installed for your particular distro ?

Development Packages
 

I just installed the xfree development package and now the compiling process goes a lot further. It still stops though. But now the error message is:
checking for libz.... configure: error: not found!
I figured it would be something to install aswell so I went through YaST looking for libz... and found a libz something devel - which seems to be some file for gnome. So I installed that aswell, but it still stops there.....
what else could i be missing?
Thank you for the help!

Re: Development Packages
 

If configure still "stops there", that means it still complains it can't find libz, right? So that's what you have to fix. Maybe it's the wrong libz, the wrong version of libz, or, most likely, configure just can't find it where you put it. Examine config.log to try to figure out why libz wasn't found. Look at the output of "./configure --help" to see if there is an option for you to specify where libz is to be found. If not, maybe you can move libz to where configure is looking for it, or make soft links there to it. It's possible you might have to run ldconfig before libz can be found.

For libz (it's actually libz.so), install zlib :) ..........PS: it's a compression library used by various programs.....

Do you actually have Make installed? I use SuSE 9.0 and I cannot quite remember, but I think it did not come with Make installed. You should be able to install it using YaST. Also, sometimes the ./configure script does come up with a couple of faliures aswell, such-and-such not found and everything, but it still might work. Then again it might not!

so intresting