gnome-libs / zlib version problem

[chris harrison <chris lowfield co uk>]

Greetings all,

I'm trying to compile gnome-libs locally (ie. not as root). 
The trouble is that 
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/lib

throws an error 

checking for grantpt in -lpt... no
checking for inflate in -lz... no
checking for compress in -lz... no
configure: error: 
*** Incorrect libz version found.  Please make sure you do not have
*** an outdated libz.a or libz.so hiding in your X11 distribution or
*** elsewhere on your system.  Versions of libz with the compress and
*** uncompress symbols are sufficiently recent to build GNOME.


This, despite libz 1.1.3 having been installed locally. 

I've been generally tinkering to no effect - if there are
other versions of libz.a and/or libz.so around I can't 
delete them - I'm presuming that I can get configure to
look at the libs in a different order? 

If the versions are sufficiently recent, as the error message says, 
how can I build gnome anyway? 

Any hints? 

Thanks. 

-- 
chris harrison
http://www.lowfield.co.uk/