JACK and synths

Has anyone here been able to build a recent version of JACK http://jackit.sourceforge.net on suse 8.1? I'm having no luck I always hit errors when the examples dir starts to compile. I was reading the synth article in linux journal and got all excited but so far have had little luck getting any of the mentioned synths to work. (actually Bristol works nicely, and although it had an error compiling, amsynthe looks like it wants to workalso). Tips? recommended synth progs for suse? thanks -- dh Don't shop at GoogleGear.com!