"fatal error: gtk/gtk.h: No such file or directory" using make

This means that you don't have the gtk headers to build stuff using GTK+. Is really weird that the error didn't showed up at ./configure step. To solve this just do:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

or libgtk-3-dev.

That should do it.

sudo apt-get install build-essential gnome-devel

That is also needed so that you can do cool things like:

g++ main.cpp -o base `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-3.0`

It allows you to use pkg-config to save a whole lot of time

Gtk3 equivalent debian/ubuntu package is libgtk-3-dev