Revision of Compiling software from source code from Fri, 07/12/2013 - 20:10

The most common method is the set of commands

./configure
make
make install

Go to the folder where the software source code is using terminal

cd /path/to/your/software

then

./configure

or

./configure --prefix=/opt/software-name 

This variation makes it easier to remove the software just by deleting the folder "/opt/software-name".

If there are errors then you need to download required packages from repositories mostly they are like "packagename-dev" then repeat step 2. If you get no errors you could run

make

This will compile the source code. You may now run

sudo su

This will make you the root user and you'll still be in the same directory. The last step is

make install

This standardized way to build software is made possible by the GNU build system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_build_system