Red Hat Enterprise Linux is never bleeding-edge. And many other packages are not supported in RHEL. So what to do?

RHEL is typically based on an earlier Fedora ( redhat uses the Fedora community in part to shake out bugs so that EL can be as robust as it needs to be ), so older Fedora packages often work on ELs. That also means that instead of compiling from source and having path problems, you can rebuild from SRPMS. So find the FC that your EL was based on, grab the relevant FC SRPMS and do an rpmbuild --rebuild on the SRPM. You'll wind up rpms that have all of the libs in the right places ( and you should also get a clear picture of any dependency problems ). You can also just try the older corresponding FC rpms, too.

Hrm..looking at the DAG repositiory, i see libgpod RPMS compiled for EL4 and centos, so you might not even have to play games. ( http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/libgpod/ )

best,
dan