There is a server that I do work on, running an older version of Linux. I don't have root access to the system, so I wanted to build a more recent version of a tool that I use a lot (Vim 7.3). I figured I would just build it and install it in ~/bin. However, it requires ncurses development files which are not installed system-wide. I found the ncurses-devel rpm, and extracted the 'lib' and 'include' folders, where would I put them and how would I tell the ./configure script to find them so I could properly configure and build the package locally?

Edit: I ended up working around this by installing the identical OS in Virtualbox, and building the package there and copying over the binaries.