Once you have checked out the code, you need to run the autoconf/automake scripts to generate the configure script and makefiles. It's fairly simple (assuming you've logged into the CVS server).
| cvs checkout |
| cd target |
| ./autogen.sh |
If there are any arguments you want to supply to the configure script, add them as arguments to the autogen.sh command. Or simply erase the config.cache file and run ./configure with the proper args.