Hmmm. As far as I can see, Penguins is just a child/theme layer of Minimalism - basically a layout, rather than a layout STYLE if that makes sense? It still needs Minimalism to function, the same way a layout written from scratch would - all theme layers do is say what size and colour font to use, where to align the headers and so on. If you think of the style as a bookshelf, and the layout as books on the shelf, all Penguins is doing is specifying books of a certain size or colour, whereas a premade would specify books of a different size or colour to go on the shelf. The reason dw's compiler won't compile it is because it's just a colour theme layer rather than a layout all on its own. The lj layout you're using might be drawing on elements of the Penguins theme, and only changing certain colours or font sizes instead of all of them, but it still needs the Minimalism parent layout to work properly.

I can take a look at the layout premade and see if I can see why they call for Penguins specifically if you like! In all my years of coding, I've never seen anyone need to do that. Most of the layouts I've used rely on just the parent and completely rewrite any colours in the child layer, so it doesn't matter which one you pick; you could use Penguins or Georgia or Crazy Day or any of the other 46 children Minimalist has.