For anyone building from source on Linux, finding the necessary packages can be journey by itself. Sometimes the failure during make can give insight, but still requires finding the correct name of the packages. For those using distros with aptitude, there is an easy way to obtain source packages for compilation. Lets assume we are compiling package x. Then in the terminal run:

sudo apt-get build-dep x

In this case, APT will download all packages necessary for building x. Note that there are caveats. This will download the dependent packages for the latest version of the software available. If your source code has radically changed since then, these packages might be very old. However, in most cases when you’re trying to compile the latest it will work nicely.