I built and ran the devcoind, though it built of course as bitcoind, it did create a .devcoin directory at least!
After that I built and ran the devcoin-qt, it told be it could not run since I had devcoind already running, so I stopped that and reran it. It is now showing as only having one connection and 6581 block(s) downloaded.
I build it on Debian 6, and had to install the boost libraries, and gthread2.0 and qt4-qmake to get it all to build.
Not really sure what to do now though!
The INSTALL file mentions some files that need to be in the program's "current directory" aka "present working directory" when the program is run.
As you mention needing Qt, it sounds like you made devcoin-qt as well as devcoind?
The INSTALL for devcoind mentions one typically strips it (to make it smaller) and renames it as devcoind.
I forgot to mention the idea of stripping it for size in devcoin-qt's INSTALL file.
Devcoin-qt cannot mine. So if you want to mine it is devcoind you will want to run, at least while mining.
With some routers, if you compile with USE_UPNP active, it might be able to open the port it needs for networking automagically. If not, you will probably need to tell your router to route that port number, tcp protocol, to that port on that machine.
Having the port open lets others connect to you, if you don't open the port you might experience for yourself what you would be helping cause others to experience: difficulty in finding someone to connect to.
Whether you mine or not is up to you. But we need people with the port (port 52333) open as lack of such people is why others have trouble at this early stage in finding people to connect to. Basically we need to establish a bunch of 24/7 nodes, and even, once we know who they are, put their static IP address if they have one, or their no-ip.org dynamic name or equivalent, right into the program as seed nodes to help make sure people find others to connect to swiftly and easily.
As we have switched over from the Groupcoin thread to a specifically Devcoin thread now I have started a #devcoin channel on freenode IRC so we don't have to use the #groupcoin channel there for chats about devcoin.
-MarkM-
P.S. I am going to go investigate importing of keys now so that hopefully shortly after you are able to tell us your devcoin receiving address I will be able to send you some bounty...