Terminfo/termcap not found

[FiL]

Hello!I am trying to install irssi on a remote server without having admin permissions..At first i installed the glib locally(which is needed for irssi) and then i tried to install irssi (running ./configure --prefix=$HOME) but the fact is that i get this error:
configure: error: Terminfo/termcap not found - install ncurses-devel package

Since i am familliar only with ubuntu distro (i don't know how rpms work) i found the ncurses from debian ( ht tp :/ /packages.debian.org/lenny/libncurses5-dev ) and i downloaded the source package. ( ht tp :/ /packages.debian.org/source/lenny/ncurses ). I installed it again with the &HOME prefix but unfortunately i get the same error .Shouldn't it work ?
Anyway i also tried to install it with the rpm package ( ht tp :/ /rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/13282115/com/ncurses-devel-5.7-3.20090207.fc12.x86_64.rpm.html ) using the --relocate option but i get this message :
rpm: --relocate and --excludepath may only be used when installing new packages

Can anyone help me?

Thanx in advance..

PS:The system i am trying to install irssi is
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.4 (Tikanga)

PS2: oh my god what is this? You are only allowed to post URLs to other sites after you have made 15 posts or more.
anyway just erase any space from the urls

[Rubberman]

You probably didn't need to download/install the ncurses package. Look in /etc for the termcap database (deprecated) or /usr/share/terminfo (more current). If neither is there, then you needed to install the ncurses package, but you should not have used the debian packages to do so - get the RHEL or CentOS ones. Since you don't have administrator privileges, you will, as you seem to know, need to install them locally in your home directory structure. Then you will need to set some environment variables so that the irssi package can find the shared libraries it needs and the termcap/terminfo database(s). For shared libraries, the variable is LD_LIBRARY_PATH. For terminfo, you will use the TERMINFO and/or TERMINFO_DIRS variable(s).

[Rubberman]

Also, since you don't have admin privileges, you will need to install locally from source.

[FiL]

Also, since you don't have admin privileges, you will need to install locally from source.

Thank you very very very much for the answers

By saying i have to install it from the source you mean the rpm source? (source.rpm)
Because i have looked all over the internet and i didn't find the source(and the termcap project) itself but instead only rpms.(as i read on a webpage, debian has excluded this package since 2005)
I only found the source rpm which contains the source and a patch.The source itself(probably it is the original source) contains errors when i run the make command so i have to patch it..
(is it really so difficult to patch a source rpm or am i making a mistake? )

Anyway thanx again

[Rubberman]

If a patch was provided, you need to apply the patch with either the -bp or -tp options. From the rpmbuild --help output:

  -bp                           build through %prep (unpack sources and apply
                                patches) from <specfile>
  -tp                           build through %prep (unpack sources and apply
                                patches) from <tarball>