I believe the Freetype configure checks are backward. First we check for the library being present, and only then do we check for the freetype-config problem: AC_SUBST(FREETYPELIBS,"") AC_SUBST(FREETYPEINCL,"") AC_CHECK_LIB(freetype,FT_Init_FreeType,ft_lib=yes,ft_lib=no,$X_LIBS) if test "$ft_lib" = "no" then wine_cv_msg_freetype=no else AC_CHECK_PROG(ft_devel,freetype-config,freetype-config,no) This fails to work when Freetype is installed somewhere outside of /usr/ such as /usr/local/ with /usr/local/bin in the path. freetype-config would of course know where to look for the library, but we perform the check for the library first, without taking the output of freetype-config into concern. Wouldn't it make sense to revert these two changes?