Unfortunately I'm not a autoconf/automake guru. But I think I can state: automake > 1.4 does not work.
I can't say exactly what's wrong. But please try to use automake 1.6 togehther with the KDE3 default admin files. And you'll see: It is impossible. You get a lot of errors. And if you bring it to works with some tricks it does a lot of errors during installation. (some pixmaps and other files are not installed.) First I upgraded from automake 1.5 (which comes with SuSE-Linux 8.0) to automake 1.6. This was terrible. After that I downgraded ti automake 1.4 --> all works -- J.Anders, Chemnitz, GERMANY ([EMAIL PROTECTED])