Do I run this command from a terminal window.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Yes. I'm sorry I haven't followed this thread to know exactly
what you wish to do, but I use my Ubuntu 8.04 (formerly 7.10
before the auto-upgrade earlier this year (which was impressive))
for all my astronomy apps (compiling a lot of programs) and here's
the full sequence from my CHANGELOG of what I found necessary to
be able to build the programs I wanted:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install manpages-dev
$ sudo apt-get install manpages-posix-dev
$ sudo apt-get install manpages-posix
$ sudo apt-get install libc6-dev
$ sudo apt-get install gcc-doc
$ sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
$ sudo apt-get install xorg-dev
$ sudo apt-get install x11proto-print-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libxp-dev
$ sudo apt-get install apt-file
$ sudo apt-get install devscripts fakeroot