The new build system uses CMake (http://www.cmake.org). It handles all platform differences. In addition to the information in the README.md file on prerequisites, here are some additional guidelines: The XDR functions are no longer in the GNU library, so you will need an additional package to supply them. The README.md suggests one; another is tirpc. This is available on OpenSUSE, for example, via zypper install libtirpc-devel. The documentation can only be built if you have latex2html (version 2008), pdflatex and lyx installed. If you don't, turn off the ENABLE_HELP option (using the ccmake command or any other CMake frontend). Note that the GUI version definitely needs FLTK-1.3. CMake apparently finds a system-installed version of this without difficulty. However, it is not entirely clear if static linking, should you prefer it, will work properly with the current setup. One possibility is to build FLTK yourself and ensure that your own version is found before the system one; that should allow static linking. For the console version you will have to make sure your system offers a SYSV compatible curses. You can check that you do by looking at its include file curses.h; it should e.g. contain KEY_ macros. If you have a system which contains BSD and SYSV curses libraries, make sure (by checking the cmake variables) that the SYSV curses.h is used. This particularly applies if you use the SYSV curses clone ncurses. If you do so, further make sure that you use version 4 or higher. Otherwise teapot may not work correctly and you get corrupted screen output. Since version 4 makes it easy to be built as shared (ELF) library, this can reduce the size of the teapot binary considerably. If you want the curses frontend to be fully UTF-8 aware, you need libncursesw (Debian package name: libncursesw5-dev).