Sometimes, you'll run into some kind of error that you simply don't know how to fix. As your experience with UNIX/Linux grows, you'll be able to diagnose more and more seemingly cryptic error conditions that you encounter during the configure and make process.

Sometimes, errors occur because an installed library is too old (or possibly even too new!). Other times, the problem you're having is actually the fault of the developers, who may not have anticipated their program running on a system such as yours -- or maybe they just made a typo :)