RE: original message http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtkmm-list/2003-May/msg00175.html about missing .so on shared libs:
I had the same issue. Where libgtkmm-2.0 is a symlink to libgtkmm-2.0.1.5.1 and similarly with the others instead of libgtkmm-2.0.so -> libgtkmm-2.0.so.1.5.1. The original thread makes it seem like this is an issue when building the rpm, but its not. I got the same behaviour building from source on the command line and via rpm.
Running libtoolize -c -f before ./configure seems to fix this. Libtool version 1.5.