what's '--rpath'?

[Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome@real-time.com>]

galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net -- a cool mozilla-based web browser) crashes
on a certain machine, while starting. 
so I'm trying to compile one from source, hoping to fix library problems. 
however, while trying to compile the galeon src.rpm, I get the following errors:

/usr/bin/ld: warning: libplds4.so, needed by
/usr/lib/mozilla/libgtkembedmoz.so, n
ot found (try using --rpath)
/usr/bin/ld: warning: libplc4.so, needed by
/usr/lib/mozilla/libgtkembedmoz.so, no
t found (try using --rpath)
/usr/bin/ld: warning: libnspr4.so, needed by
/usr/lib/mozilla/libgtkembedmoz.so, n
ot found (try using --rpath)

however:
[admin@iron ~]$ locate libplds4.so
/usr/lib/mozilla/libplds4.so

what the heck is --rpath, and how do I use it?

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
(952) 943-8700