Trying to 'make' kmess under rh9, i got an error saying
/usr/share/lib/libmime.so did not exist.
I got over this problem by makeing a duplicate of libmime.so.1 and renaming it libmime.so
it worked for me, just fine, so if anybody else is going to attempt to compile kmess under rh9 (maybe even 8 as well!) be warned.