The general idea with GNU Build system is to 

• ./configure
• make 
• make install

However if there are problems it is not quite so simple.   The following notes are how I resolved the issues that arose. 

My QUCS Build Notes

These notes assume you already have the QUCS source code sitting in a folder somewhere.  This instructions are for Ubuntu / Debian Linux which I use for my investigations.

• Recents notes on sourceforge by Frans on building regarding qt3 and qt4
• ADMS – analog mixed signal – I had to download and build.  The build system specified the correct location under linux to match the QUCS build – When I search for this I was only using APT-GET.  Need to recheck using Synaptic – much easier to find packages.
•  download Qt3 3.3.8 – download to personal file area.  Follow instructions here on how to setup.       / unzip / rename to Qt and use terminal command:  sudo mv ./qt /usr/local
• Qt 3.3.8 Download from Nokia FTP

Tools required by QUCS build:  Much of this available as GNU Build Essentials – Using Synaptic – much easier!  I installed these components:

• Autoconf version 2.57 (at least) – Autoconf is an extensible package of M4 macros that produce shell scripts to automatically configure software source code packages.   
• GNU automake 1.7.0 (at least) – Automake is a tool for automatically generating `Makefile.in' files compliant with the GNU Coding Standards. Automake requires the use of Autoconf.  sudo apt-get install build-essential
• flex 2.5.31 (but at least 2.5.9) – (The Fast Lexical Analyzer) – fast lexical analyser generator. It is a tool for generating programs that perform pattern-matching on text. Flex is a free (but non-GNU) implementation of the original Unix lex program. To download the software, get the documentation, and more, please see the Flex home page – sudo apt-get install flex
• GNU Bison 1.875d  – this is a parser generator – sudo apt-get install bison
• Qt installation >= version 3.1 (by Trolltech)
• GNU M4 (any version) – I think was installed with build-essentials or gcc
• GNU gperf 3.0.1  – sudo apt-get install gperf
• adms 2.2.4 (at least) – Verilog-AMS (Analog and Mixed Signals) is a language designed to describe and simulate analog and mixed signal designs using both the top-level design methodology as well as the more traditional bottom up approach. SourceForge Download

Step: Add to .profile file to get Qt3 to build

    In .profile (if your shell is bash, ksh, zsh or sh), add the following lines:  

 QTDIR=/usr/local/qt PATH=$QTDIR/bin:$PATH MANPATH=$QTDIR/doc/man:$MANPATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH export QTDIR PATH MANPATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH