Vorbis - Sep 2004 - building libao for an ARM platform

I am having trouble configuring libao for cross compiling for an arm 
target on an x86 host. I try
./confgure --target=arm
but, get the following error
configure: error: can not run test program while cross compiling
and it ends without finishing.

How can I configure it for arm development on an x86 system?

tj