The Ubuntu repository for software lags the new versions for programs. This is a good thing because it would be a nightmare if it was updated for every nightly build for the  tens of thousands of packages !

But sometimes you want the latest version of an application and I wanted the latest version of GNUCash so I wanted to build from source.

I got some odd GUILE issues which are easily fixed as below for an Ubuntu 10.10 platform.

Assuming you have all your other GNUCash make dependencies correct you will probably still get a configure failure with the error,

checking for guile - 1.6.7 <= version < 99.99.99... yes: 1.8.7
checking for guile - 1.8.0 <= version < 99.99.99... yes: 1.8.7
checking for SLIB support... configure: error: 

Cannot find SLIB.  Are you sure you have it installed?
See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347922
and http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483631

…because there is no Guile 1.8-slib package (there is a 1.6 package). The package does two things,

1) Adds a soft link in the Guile 1.X to SLIB

cd  /usr/share/guile/1.8/
 sudo ln -s ../../slib slib

2) Builds a slibcat file which can be done with this command,

sudo guile -c "(use-modules (ice-9 slib)) (require 'printf)"

Thus do those two steps and you’ll fix this SLIB issue and can proceed with your make.

Note that after building GNUCash you will probably get the error,

gnucash: error while loading shared libraries: libgnc-qof.so.1: cannot open  shared object file: No such file or directory

…which is because the ldconfig cache is not updated.
You must run,

sudo ldconfig -v

after you have done the make install to fix this issue.