Can you skip the "checking.." steps when running ./configure?
Solution 1:
./configure can be told to cache the results of the checks with the option -C, see here.
Solution 2:
autoconf is used to provide a way of determining the capabilities of the host on which the application is being compiled. Skipping these checks would imply it doesn't know what the capabilities of the build target.
As mentioned above, you can cache the results but you'd need to run it at least once to prime the cache.