Hi J. Felix and Sunil,
I'm wondering: Are you actually intending to do development on the SIMtrace2 software, or do you just want to use it?
If you just want to use it, why not simply use the osmocom packages provided for Ubuntu 18.04 at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/osmocom:/nightly/xUbuntu_... as explained at https://osmocom.org/projects/cellular-infrastructure/wiki/Nightly_Builds
Building from source should generally only be done by developers who want to contribute to development/extension of the software. And for those, I would sort-of expect that they know how to do system-level C development on Linux, including auto-tools, pkg-config, etc.
Regards, Harald