The configure script may have trouble locating SDL. This usually means that you have not SDL installed, or you SDL is not in your path (SDL contains configuration script which gets to path when you install it), or your SDL is too old. It is also possible (even likely if you have specific linux distribution, and/or install newer SDL manually) that you have several versions of SDL in your system, and they mess up each other.
If you are trying to build Teddy on multiuser system where you are not superuser, there might be SDL installed on the system, but it might not be in the default path. Ask if SDL is present and where it would be. You have also option to install your own version of SDL using prefix option of SDL configure script. You may get it work even on top of older version of SDL if you set paths correctly.
Compiling may fail for several reasons. If you get errors about SDL or other library includes in Win32 MSVC environment, you must add SDL includes (also libs) to Tools/Options/Directories in Visual Studio. In linux the ./configure -script usually makes sure SDL and other libraries will work.
Compiling may also fail if for some reason platform dependent code is tried to be built on alien platform. This will happen when someone who has written the code has not been careful. You will have to isolate the offending code and disable it for your platform, or write implementation. I mean, you could, if you wanted to. Usually you should just let me know.
Compiling may also fail just because there is error in the code. This can happen when someone fixes the code when resolving CVS
Visual studio project and workspace files may be corrupted in some weird way. This may happen when development takes place in linux side and things change. You may need to add and or remove files or even add new projects.
If you use the same directory on multiple machines, from network filesystem, or simply pack and copy to other machine, or upgrade you machine, you should remember to clean the old working files. This problem is severe in linux environment; configure cache may be incorrect for the new system; Makefile generated by configure may be outdated, etc. In linux environment source dependencies are generated by Makefile by scanning source directories for sources. Thus if new files are added or got from CVS update, you will have to make clean, maybe rerun configure and make sure Makefile is updated.
Linking programs with Teddy library
In linux environment you may get errors about missing symbols even though source code is fine and compiles without errors. It turns out that gcc processes files in the order which they are given on the command line. When gcc is linking libraries, it only picks those symbols that have been referenced so far. I think I have fixed these problems now by using ar to create a single .lib file from all program .o files before doing gcc linking with just .lib files.
If you have not set up SDL and other libraries correctly you will have problems with linking, too.
You will need SDL library. Other libraries, SDL_image and SDL_mixer, are optional. SDL_image further requires libpng, libz, and libpng.
Running programs using Teddy library
Executable will happily crash if it can not find some crucial data files. The normal ./configure && make procedure in linux will copy executables to the Release/ directory, which is outside the CVS, but part of the source archive. You must run executables there.