Compiling Software from Source

Compiling applications from source is not that difficult. There are two ways to do this: You can use the source code available in the Ubuntu repositories, or you can use source code provided by upstream developers (most useful for those projects that are not available in the Ubuntu repositories). For either method, you will need to install the package build-essential to ensure that you have the tools you need for compilation. You may also need to install automake and checkinstall, which are build tools.

Compiling from a Tarball

Most source code that is not in the Ubuntu repositories is available as compressed source tarballs—that is, tar files that have been compressed using gzip or bzip. The compressed files typically uncompress into a directory containing several files. It is always a good idea to compile source code as a regular user to limit any damage that broken or malicious code might inflict, so create a directory named source in your home directory.