Simon and Diego, Your assistance was most helpful. Just to follow up I am posting my modifications to the code I was working on in case anyone else has the same question:
To allegro-learning/src/Makefile.am: stargatedir = $(datadir)/stargate stargate_DATA = stargate.bmp stargate_SOURCES = stargate.c stargate_CFLAGS = $(ALLEGRO_CFLAGS) -DPKGDATADIR=\"$(stargatedir)\" stargate_LDFLAGS = $(ALLEGRO_LIBS) To stargate.c I added the following: #include <stdio.h> // for nice string concatenation: #define Sasprintf(write_to, ...) { \ char *tmp_string_for_extend = (write_to); \ asprintf(&(write_to), __VA_ARGS__); \ free(tmp_string_for_extend); \ } char* addImageBaseDir(char* filename) { char *abspath = NULL; Sasprintf(abspath, PKGDATADIR); Sasprintf(abspath, "%s%s%s", abspath, "/", "stargate.bmp"); return abspath; } and now I replace the original, stargate = load_bitmap("stargate.bmp", NULL); with, stargate = load_bitmap(addImageBaseDir("stargate.bmp"), NULL) and building with autotools now works just fine. All the files land in the proper location and through the macro the paths are available to the code. Thanks again! Jamil