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Compiling and installing software from sources

Getting open source programs from their original source code

Daniel Robbins, Chief architect, Gentoo Linux, Microsoft

Daniel Robbins lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was the founder and chief architect of the Gentoo Linux project. Daniel now works with Microsoft and describes his position as "helping Microsoft to understand Open Source and community-based projects."

Summary: If you're relatively new to Linux®, or any other UNIX® or UNIX-like operating system, and would like to learn how to compile and install open source programs from their original source code, then this tutorial is for you. In this tutorial, you learn how to compile the vast majority of UNIX sources. The unpacking, inspection, configuration, compilation, and installation steps are covered in detail.

Date: 15 Aug 2000
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (34 KB | 10 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 15055 views
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Before you start

About this tutorial

Let's say that you find a particular application that you'd like to install on your system. Maybe you need to run a very recent version of this program, and this most recent version isn't yet available in a packaging format such as RPM. Perhaps this particular application is only available in source form, or you need to enable certain features of the program that are not enabled in the RPM by default.

Whatever the reason, whether of necessity or simply just because you want to compile the program from its sources, this tutorial will show you how.

Prerequisites

To get the most from this tutorial, you should already have a basic knowledge of Linux and a working Linux system on which you can practice the commands covered in this tutorial.

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