ghb requires recent a recent version of glib with gio.  These
are available in ubuntu 8.04 and fedora 9.  I don't know about other
distributions. Dependencies needed for building:

    * subversion
    * jam
    * yasm
    * build-essential
    * autogen
    * autoconf
    * intltool
    * libtool
    * zlib1g-dev
    * libbz2-dev
    * libglib2.0-dev
    * libgtk2.0-dev
    * libhal-dev
    * libhal-storage-dev
    * libgtkhtml3.14-dev
    * libgstreamer0.10-dev
    * libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev 

Currently, to build you must build handbrake separately, then
autogen and build the gtk ui. e.g.

./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

You can test without installing:
cd src
./ghb