I have built gds-2.8 on my RH9 laptop. Note that the framecpp build requires
the Bzip2 header files which do not come with RH9 by default. You can get an
rpm from 

    ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/9/en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/bzip2-devel-1.0.2-8.i386.rpm

and install it (from root) with

   rpm -i bzip2-devel-1.0.2-8.i386.rpm

You must then build or install a recent version (3.05-09 or later) of Root 
with the same compiler as the one you  will use to build the GDS software.
The script at 

  http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~jzweizig/dmt/DMTProject/root-make

can be used for this. The root-make script requires that you specify the 
root_dir, root_vsn and xpm_dir symbols before you run it. You will have to 
log on to the root cvs repository with:

    % export CVSROOT=:pserver:cvs@root.cern.ch:/user/cvs
    % cvs login
    (Logging in to cvs@root.cern.ch)
    CVS password: cvs

and then run root-make.

I then build gds with the script linked on the DMT-Download page

  http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~jzweizig/dmt/DMTProject/build-gds

You must modify the lines at the beginning of the script, setting the gdsdir, 
gdsrev and rootdir symbols as appropriate for your installation.

Note that the script uses the readonly cvs account. You can replace the 
account name in the script or specify the readonly password by running:

cvs login -d :pserver:readonly@ldas-sw.ligo.caltech.edu:/ldcg_server/common/repository_gds

And specifying the password.

A few problems I found while running the script:
 1) I hadn't installed bzip2-devel before I started. See the instructions
    above to install this package from an rpm. It installs only the header 
    and archive files... if you aren't running a reasonably vanilla version 
    of RH9 you might want to make sure that the version of libbz2.so matches.
 2) I hadn't installed ligotools. Make sure LIGOTOOLS is defined before 
    running the script. gds-2.8.1 requires dataflow-5.4. A previous version
    (dataflow-4.13) resulted in a missing symbol (__ctype_b).
 3) BicoMon needs fftw-3 which I hadn't installed. I removed BicoMon from
    the DIRS symbol in Monitors/Makefile
 4) Both the scripts mentioned above take a long time to complete. Make 
    sure that they aren't still running (with e.g. ps or top) before doing
    anything drastic.