I just tried compiling gstat on a Mandrake machine, and it worked -- not with grass, as grass was not present on that machine, but it compiled with ncurses.
Most probably you did not install the development versions of ncurses and libz on your machine. They are needed to compile programs that use them. Make sure you do a make veryclean in the gstat directory before retrying ./configure You can ignore the errors in the doc directory -- documentation is not (yet) included in the source distribution. Best regards, -- Edzer