One caveat there: there's not enough quota underneath the dia
directory to hold the source and object files produced, so one has to
copy the sources (and helper scripts) to another location, like /tmp,
before compilation.

Dia has two main dependencies that need to be satisfied before it can
be compiled: libxml and gdk-pixbuf.  
the source for both is located here along with the source for dia.

[ Update [pnkfelix] Wed Jun 26 15:04:12 EDT 2002  
  dia-0.90 adds an additional dependency on libunicode, which I have
  added to the src directory.  Also, it requires a more recent version 
  of libxml than what the online documentation for Dia says; I have
  also added that to the src directory ]

[ Update [ssen] Thu Aug 29 19:47:07 EDT 2002
  Athena 9.1 has all the gtk and gnome stuff in the install.
  All that's needed is libunicode ]
 
the try-* scripts attempt to "do the right thing" in terms of setting
up environment variables, etc, before calling configure.  These are
hard-coded for working on athena; they're not useful to you if you've
copied the tar.gz's to a non-athena machine.


and finally:
    try-dia
    cd dia; make; make install; cd -