vte or freetype problem emerging Gnome

[Darth Marley]

I am a newbie trying to get a Gentoo i586 2.6.18-r2 kernel to work on an old P1-MMX 200 MHz box.

With up to date portage, I am getting stalled at the vte package during the installation of the gnome and xscreensaver dependencies.

"Checking for FreeType - version>+ 6.1.0...no"
"the FreeType test program failed to run. If your system uses shared libraries and they are installed outside the normal system library path,
make sure the LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or whatever is appropriate for your system)is correctly set
configure error;You must have freetype 2.0.2 or later to build vte"

I have tried to separately emerge freetype, but that does not solve the issue. So I know that freetype exists above the required version level.

Attempting to separately emerge vte results in the same error.

I am thinking that some path or possibly symlink is not making the version of freetype visible to the build.
I could use a detailed walkthrough if this is the real culprit.

In Googling the error message, I get many hits on the same error messages for a variety of distros, but nothing that offers a simple, or well presented fix for the issue. And that strikes me as odd.

[Darth Marley]

Hopefully the answer at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-461410.html will work for me.