For your information, I attempted to build MAME 0.172 on freshly installed Ubuntu and openSUSE Linux. The typical problem is that new people fail at building because they do not find out what packages to install, while those who are already doing builds for a longer time just don't remember what packages they installed in the past.

Packages to install for Ubuntu (15.10):

Code
git
qt5-default
libsdl2-ttf-dev 
libfontconfig1-dev

Packages to install for openSUSE (42.1 LEAP)

Code
git-core
gcc5-c++ 
libqt5-qtbase-devel
xorg-x11-devel
alsa-devel
libSDL2_ttf-devel

More packages are automatically pulled in by the dependencies resolution.