Anybody get spice to install on Linux?

I used to have a program called "Electronic Workshop" and it was great. You
could put transistors, resistors, and all kinds of electronic parts on a
board and then "run" the circuit to see how it would behave. It seems that
some other fellow was so impressed with Electronic Workshop that he started
a thing called "spice" which is the same thing only free for Linux. I
downloaded the tarball, extracted it, did the ./configure, the make, moved
all docs to "doc-pak" and then ran checkinstall "checkinstall ?R make
install". The thing failed miserably, were at make(5) by the time the thing
gave up.

Has anyone got spice to install on Linux and how did you do it? The program
is here:
http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ngspice/

Oh there are binary files, deb files for Debian. Can they be used for
Fedora and if so, how?
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=38962&package_id=
31152

If not then what is my best bet for tracking down why my tarball install
failed. I really need help with this as it seems quite daunting and if
there are really 5 errors, I will not be able to find them. Many of the
lines during the make said "Entering such and such directory, file not
found, nothing to do, leaving". How do you go about dealing with that
stuff? Thank you.

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