So the early returns are already coming in, and it seems that an awful lot of systems will be lacking one or more required packages to get the codebase to compile.

So listen up people. Read and know.

Graphic Libraries

If you get a bunch of spam starting off complaining that gd.h is missing, then you need the GD Development package.

In Fedora:

yum install gd-devel

This will resolve the necessary dependencies to make it work. This package is required for the overland code to function. And before you ask. No. It's not being made optional. So just don't.

In Ubuntu:

apt-get install libgd2-dev ( if that doesn't work, try: apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev )

SQL Support (Optional)

For MySQL support, this is less clear as to what you'll require. But chances are you'll need the MySQL server and a MySQL client, along with the MySQL development packages. If you're in a hosted environment, chances are high you already have this provided to you.

How to obtain these varies widely by system.

For recent copies of Fedora, it looks like all you'll need are:

yum install mysql
yum install mysql-devel
yum install mysql-server

For Ubuntu systems:

apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev

Not sure what the package name for the server is but without it you're probably not going to get far.

Cygwin users are out of luck. There is no MySQL support available, so you'll just need to skip it.

I don't know if this is possible, but you can install MySQL on Windows so you may be able to "connect" that with Cygwin to get it working.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#downloads

The library package for Ubuntu didn't work for me. Instead, I used this.

apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev

Thanks. I wish they'd settle on one name for these libraries and stick to it.

while lib-hunting I chose to install some libgd-something-* and accidentally uninstalled the existing libgd2-xpm-i386 binary and ubuntu-desktop-i386 by not recognizing the "to be removed" area until i hit enter. luckily, that's where logs come in handy...

the ubuntu packages libgd2-xpm-dev and libgd2-noxpm-dev are instead of simply libgd2-dev.
I assume that the difference in libgd2's are an attempt to shorten the size of the pre-compiled lib*-dev for non-X deployments..

On another note, it would be most helpful though to have a dependency list (short as it would be) included with the codebase to help alleviate the influx of panic