The problem you describe is from installing Kopete in the wrong place.
With KDE 3.2 and SuSE you can get Kopete 0.8.2 in the SuSE rpms. The package you have to install is kdenetwork3-InstantMessenger.
Otherwise, you need to read up a bit about how to compile KDE apps, you can't just configure; make; make install and link the executable to /usr/local/bin.
If you really want to build the 0.8.2 source (which is the same as the RPM version) read the build and install tips pages at
http://kopete.kde.org/index.php?page=installtips.