Unable to find Ncurses libararies/Compile Kernel

[fdfisher@oberlin.edu (Forest Fisher)]

I'm trying to upgrade from the 2.4.18 kernel that installs with the
bf24 flavor to hopefully a 2.6.1 kernel but at the very least, a
2.4.24 kernel.  I put the zipped source code (i.e.
linux-2.6.1.tar.bz2) into the /usr/src directory, checked to make sure
there were no symlinks, and then did:

#tar -xjvf linux-2.6.1.tar.bz2

Then, I used

#ln -s linux-2.6.1 linux

to create the appropriate symlink to the new directory.  Finally, I
changed directories to /usr/src/linux/ and tried:

#make menuconfig

This didn't work with the 2.6.1 source and I didn't understand the
errors so I tried the same thing with the 2.4.24 source.  This time,
it said:

rm -f include/asm
( cd include ; ln -sf asm-i386 asm)
make -C scripts/lxdialog all
make[1]: Entering directory '/usr/src/linux-2.4.24/scripts/lxdialog'
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

>> Unable to find Ncurses libraries.
>>
>> You must have Ncurses installed in order
>> to use 'make menuconfig'

make[1]: *** [ncurses] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-2.4.24/scripts/lxdialog;
make: *** [menuconfig] Error 2

So then I tried:

#apt-get install ncurses

and I got:

Package ncurses has no available version, but exists in the database. 
This typically means that the package was mentioned in a dependency
and never uploaded, has been obsoleted or is not available with the
contents of sources.list
E: Package ncurses has no installation candidate

So then I searched Debian's webpage and came up with libncurses5. 
Again, I tried

#apt-get intall libncurses5

This time, I got:

Sorry, libncureses5 is already the newest version.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not
upgraded.

Finally, I ran dselect just to make sure that there was an * next to
libncurses5 AND tried

#locate ncurses

which gave me a whole slew of files including

/lib/libncurses.so.5
/lib/libncurses.so.5.2
/usr/doc/libncurses5

and the directory

/usr/share/doc/libncurses

as well as /var/lib/dpkg/info/libncurses5.list and a series of other
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libncurses5.list.*

So...clearly ncurses is on my computer, but make menuconfig does not
recognize this...can anyone help?

Forest