Troubles building pips-common-3.1.0 for an Epson S20 printer.
This is on a Debian Linux system, running the testing distribution
in October 2008.

There are two bugs in ./configure : they are places where
an un-set variable appears in a "test" statement, like this
test $x = yes
so if $x is not defined, test complains about a unary equals operator.

Debian packages needed:

Detected by ./configure:

sudo aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo aptitude install libxml2-dev
sudo aptitude install libcups2-dev

Not detected by ./configure:

sudo aptitude install libltdl3-dev
sudo aptitude install libcupsimage2-dev


Then, make completes, and you can run make-install
successfully.

The instructions tell you to run ekpd-tool, but that
insists upon /sbin/pidof, which doesn't exist.
(My Debian installation has /bin/pidof .)

Those need to be fixed, then recompile:
$ find . -name '*.c' -exec fgrep /sbin/pidof {} \; -print
status = system("/sbin/pidof cupsd 2>&1 >/dev/null");
status = system("/sbin/pidof lpd 2>&1 >/dev/null");
./Core/libutils/setup.c
sprintf (com_buf, "%s%s","/sbin/pidof cupsd > ",temp_cupsid_file);
./Gui/ekpd-tool/interface.c
$ 

At this point, it's not clear what to do.    Running various programs,
I get error messages like this:

# ekpd-tool
PIPS Warning: Printer not install.
# ekpstm
PIPS Error: /etc/ekpdrc : The resource file is not exist.
PIPS Error: Default printer not found. Find the next printer...
PIPS Error: /etc/ekpdrc : The resource file is not exist.
Segmentation fault
#