From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.2)
Gecko/20040301

Description of problem:
Recommended (RedHat Sys. Admin. Guide, Appendix A) kernel
configuration method fails unless "ncurses-devel" is installed.  The
package is not 'required' when installing "kernel-source".


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
kernel-source-2.4.21-9.0.1.EL.i386.rpm

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. cd /usr/src/linux-2.4
2. cp configs/kernel-2.4.21-i686-smp.config .config
3. make menuconfig
    

Actual Results:   # make menuconfig
 rm -f include/asm
 ( cd include ; ln -sf asm-i386 asm)
 make -C scripts/lxdialog all
 make[1]: Entering directory
`/usr/src/linux-2.4.21-9.0.1.EL/scripts/lxdialog'
 gcc -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -DLOCALE 
-DCURSES_LOC="<curses.h>" -c -o checklist.o checklist.c
 In file included from checklist.c:24:
 dialog.h:29:20: curses.h: No such file or directory
 In file included from checklist.c:24:
 dialog.h:127: syntax error before "use_colors" 
   ...

Expected Results:  Expected the kernel configuration menus to be
displayed.

Additional info:

This has been reported under the Fedora Core product as bug #121228.  
I have only seen this on an i686 system, but assume other kernel archs
are affected, too.