Do you having problem in install some application from source due to some tools are not install by default at Ubuntu? Then you should install build-essential first at terminal with below command,
# sudo apt-get install build-essential
Below is the packages will install if you are using Ubuntu 7.04 as me.
linux-libc-dev (2.6.20-16.29) …
libc6-dev (2.5-0ubuntu14) …
dpkg-dev (1.13.24ubuntu6) …
libstdc++6-4.1-dev (4.1.2-0ubuntu4) …
g++-4.1 (4.1.2-0ubuntu4) …
g++ (4.1.2-1ubuntu1) …