THESE INSTRUCTIONS ARE ONLY IF "sh autogen.sh" DOESN'T WORK!!! First, read the README. This contains instructions specific to building conky fresh from a CVS checkout: * As the README says, you need to have the X development libraries installed. This should be a package along the lines of libx11-dev or xorg-x11-dev . * Conky requires three "auto-tools", with at least the specific version numbers. Make sure these are installed: aclocal-1.9 automake-1.9 autoconf-2.59 * In the directory where you checked out conky from CVS, run "aclocal", "automake", and then "autoconf". Make sure you run those commands with the latest versions... it is very possible that older versions are installed, and plain "automake" really means automake-1.4, not what we want, but "automake-1.9" instead. Use the "--version" option to check the program version, i.e. "autoconf --version". * After that, it's the familiar ./configure make make install You might have to do the last two steps as root.