Before we can begin this process, we must obtain the sources for all of the required packages to configure, make (build), and install these packages onto your system. If you do not already have a proper development environment set up on your system (compiler, linker, development headers), then please attend to that first.
There are two ways to obtain the sources for the packages required to build Evolution with support for synchronizing with your Palm handheld.
Source tarballs: Pre-packaged compressed files that contain all of the source code, as released to the public. With this, you generally unpack, configure, make, switch to the root user and install the compiled versions onto your system.
This is the "normal" way of building software, but might not be as current as downloading the latest versions of the souce code from..
CVS checkout: The absolute-latest, bleeding-edge source code for a project, with up-to-the-second changes available to the public (assuming a publically-accessible CVS server of course).
CVS stands for "Concurrent Version System", and is a means by which changes to the source code are appended to the original versions. With CVS, you can retrieve any change at any point in time, from the original creation of a file, through the whole history of changes, up to the current latest version.
To find out more about CVS, you can go to the CVS Homepage and read up on it, or download the latest version of CVS. Most Linux and FreeBSD distributions contain CVS itself, so you may already have the tools required to do a CVS checkout of the source code.
Details about using the GNOME CVS can be found over here. It will explain how to check out and build GNOME software from the GNOME cvs.
There are many documents on the web which describe which tools will be needed. Generally, you will need a compiler (gcc), a linker (found in the standard GNU binutils package), as well as tools like auotconf, make, libtool, m4, and others. These are easy to install if you are running a Linux or FreeBSD distribution with access to these as pre-built packages.