Dependency problems

[Keith <keithandcecile pa net>]

I'm a newbie at compiling programs, so please bear with me. I'm running 
Debian Potato on an i86 box, using icewm-gnome (but don't like to use 
full gnome-session with panel, etc. I just enable gmc on startup to get 
icons on desktop.) I have Gnome 1.4 installed. I did download and 
compile libesmtp successfully. When I tried to configure Balsa 1.2.4, I 
received this message:

<----------------------------------------------
loading cache ./config.cache
checking for a BSD compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking whether make sets ${MAKE}... yes
checking for working aclocal... missing
checking for working autoconf... missing
checking for working automake... missing
checking for working autoheader... missing
checking for working makeinfo... found
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for gnome-config... no
checking for gnomeConf.sh file in /usr/local/lib... not found
---------------------------------------------->

I don't know how to find out whether I have the programs and versions 
listed in INSTALL file (yes, I know, cluesless newbie) other than, if 
the Debian package is of the same name, checking dselect, or running 
<name> --version if it's a program.

I also downloaded the precompiled Potato binary (Balsa_1.2.pre1-1) 
available from the website, and tried to install that. Dpkg told me I 
needed libgal8, libgnomeprint11, libgtkhtml13, and libpspell2 packages. 
Only libgal8 was included in my sources.  Sources.list includes the 
following:

<----------------------------------------------------
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://red-carpet.ximian.com/debian stable main
deb 
ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/obsolete/helix/evolution/distributions/Debian . .
----------------------------------------------------->

However, the last line doesn't work. When I go there by hand, I find 
libpspell2, but the other two files (libgnomeprint11 and libgtkhtml13) 
either aren't there or aren't recognizable by their package names. But 
I'm left wondering why I need to get obscure, obsolete files to run 
Balsa anyway?

Is part of my problem that I'm not running the full gnome session? Is 
that necessary to run--or compile--Balsa?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Keith