eboxy requires the following packages to be installed on your system:
libxml2 2.4.19 or newer - used by many applications, available from xmlsoft.org. 2.6.7 or later recommended.
SDL 1.2 or newer
SDL_image (its requirements depend on what images you want to load - libjpeg and libpng recommended)
SDL_gui - see notes below
Flex 2.5.4a or later (not actually run, but compilation needs FlexLexer.h which comes with flex).
Apart from SDL_gui, many Linux distributions already include these required packages. Make sure you also have the "-devel" packages installed for each if your distribution has them.
Optional:
LIRC if you want to use your IR remote
eboxy was developed and tested on Gentoo Linux 1.4, but if you've got the requirements described above installed it should work on any Linux system. I would certainly support efforts to get eboxy working on other Unix platforms, so if you're interested in using it on another Unix platform, give it a try and let me know how it goes.
For Red Hat, Mandrake and other RPM-based systems, SDL_gui RPMs are available from the eboxy website. Alternatively it can be installed from source. Gentoo Linux now has a working ebuild for it (emerge sdl-gui to install).
Note: When installing SDL_gui from source, to make things easiest you should make sure it is installed into the same location (prefix) as SDL. This means if SDL is installed into /usr/lib, SDL_gui must be installed into /usr/lib as well (same goes for the other SDL support libraries). Normally, if you compile both SDL and SDL_gui from source, or install both from binary packages, this is not an issue. However if it's half and half (which it very well might be as most distributions don't have binaries for SDL_gui) you need to take care that this is done properly. The easiest way is to make sure any SDL packages you compile from source go into /usr/lib, by passing --prefix=/usr/lib to ./configure.