You would have thought that “build-essential” would include autotools but in Ubuntu 12, at least, it does not:
$ apt-cache depends build-essential
build-essential
|Depends: libc6-dev
Depends: <libc-dev>
libc6-dev
Depends: gcc
Depends: g++
Depends: make
Depends: dpkg-dev
Conflicts: build-essential:i386
– NicFerrier 2013-05-14 04:22 UTC