John, Thanks for the help. I've gone back and read INSTALL and tried several different ways to run configure. I've passed the option telling it where the Qt directory is
./configure --with-frontend=qt --with-qt-dir=/usr/lib/qt3-gcc3.2 and I've checked the environment variable, which is QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt3-gcc3.2 I also tried /usr/lib/qt3 for the directory. None of this works. I always get checking for Qt library name... failed configure: error: Cannot compile a simple Qt executable. Check you have the right $QTDIR ! Actually, I suspect that I need to know much more about Qt than I'll ever have time to find out, so I'd really be much happier doing an rpm installation, which as both Johan Marc and I discovered works just fine except for the missing display fonts (eg math fonts) and I'm still hoping somebody can tell me why that is. Steve Gregory
