I just successfully built GnuCash with a DBI backend on Debian. Here's how I did it:
apt-get build-dep gnucash apt-get source gnucash apt-get install automake intltool libtool libdbi-dev sqlite3 svn co http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk cd trunk cp -a ../gnucash-2.2.6/debian ./debian vim debian/rules
Add " --enable-dbi" to the configure command.
debian/rules binary cd ../ dpkg -i gnucash_2.2.6-2_amd64.deb
Depending on your architecture, the .deb file may be titled differently.
To use the new dbi capability, all I did was save my file with a ".db" suffix.
