How to Install Source Files in Ubuntu
Posted by mike-d on November 9th, 2007 
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lets now see how would you be installing source files in ubuntu…..
source files contain the programs and hence before the installation you need to compile them… so you need to install the build-essentials from the synaptic package manager…. else this build-essentials is already present in the cd.. and so you can install it…..else you can install it typing it in the terminal by
sudo aptitude install build-essential
suppose you have a source file name src.tar.gz, what you do initially is that you need to extract the source files and then in the terminal….
navigate to the folder where the source file is extracted using the cd commands….. and then
type the following…
./configure
make
sudo make install
clean install
lets see what each one of them does…
./configure….. checks whether the required dependencies are available on your system or not….. if not an error is reported….
make compiles the source code and make install is used to install the program in to the location
if it asks for an installation location it is recommended to install all the source to /usr/src
clean install removes any temporary files created in the installation process of the source
and thats it your source file in installed in your system.
December 19th, 2007 at 1:06 am
I’m trying to install OpenYahtzee from the source code and I can’t get this to work. The first thing I ran into is that the “build-essentials” package seems to be called “build-essential” instead.
Once I had that installed, ./configure completed just fine but I get a number of errors when I run the make command. I’d be happy to share this info if I can contact you directly - I think it’s a bit much to paste into this comment.
December 19th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
This article is useless… there are a lot of apps that don’t install that way, yet you make it sound like this method will work in all cases.
The best thing to do is to read the install instructions which can usually be found in an INSTALL text file or on the project’s website.
January 24th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
1. Enable the source repository in sources.list by commenting out the lines starting with deb-src.
2. Issue “apt-get build-dep app_name” to get the required packages for building.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
I am trying to install the clit .lit converter .I have downloaded the source code in a zip archive. It contains two folders…. “clit15″ and “lib”
What ahould i do????
January 5th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
its not build-essentials, its build-essential
January 5th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I have updated the article Thanks for your comment