It's funny I was thinking exactly the same thing to get staking. I'm about to build from source now though so will see if I get it working or not.
Good luck, but I wasn't successful.
no progress -> no wallet -> no coins -> no loss, just keep it simple

Sounds annoying. This is the way with small projects when running Linux though

It's the price you pay in my opinion.
I've just managed to configure it to recognize Open SSL (somehow) using
these instructions but I'm running 17.10 so doubt it'll work.
Not sure what it does but this line helped:
sed -i -e 's,/bin/sh -e,/bin/bash,g' autogen.sh