I had issues with this portion and attempted to use the --with-qt-libraries flag in configure to avail.
I followed these instructions and had some success: https://medium.com/@Packet99/install...8-81566001ec89. The author recommends building Qt3 with -thread during configure, and then moving the built package into /usr/local/qt3 and editing the ld configuration.
It mostly worked for me, but I'm having issues with Qt not picking up fonts. This issue is independent of ShowEQ - none of the Qt examples are able to display fonts correctly. However, I'm using Lubuntu 18.04 instead of Mint, so it may just be a product of the way my distro does (or does not) do its font management.