I had the same problem in Mandrake 9.1. I was able to kludge together a solution. Mandrake ships with ncurses 5.3, but the devel package is nowhere to be found. I downloaded RH9's ncurses-devel to go with it (whaddya know. When I used Redhat, all I could find were Mandrake RPMS for what I needed.), and I seem to have got it working.