The Freetype people seems to have invented a new way of handling their headers. Is this solved in any of the trees? From the package available in latest Debian testing combined with 7.4-HEAD:

conftest -g -mcpu=i686 -I/usr/include/freetype2 conftest.c -lfreetype -lz -ldl -lrt -lnsl -lm -lpthread -lcrypt 1>&5 In file included from configure:1104: /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/freetype.h:20:2: #error "`ft2build.h' hasn't been included yet!" /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/freetype.h:21:2: #error "Please always use macros to include FreeType header files." /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/freetype.h:22:2: #error "Example:" /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/freetype.h:23:2: #error " #include <ft2build.h>" /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/freetype.h:24:2: #error " #include FT_FREETYPE_H"