I am thinking that several of the commands i listed above need to be run with sudo.

and the configure command should be one line, but it wraps in this forum, the forum also seems to have removed the double ‘-‘

here is the configure line again. i will update the post up further

./configure --with-rpi-include-path=/opt/vc/include --with-rpi-lib-path=/opt/vc/lib --enable-rpi

there is also some changes in the latest version of autoreconf that require modification to some files before you run bootstrap

AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([.]) to the top of configure.ac
ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I . to the top of Makefile.am