From LQWiki

Find the source of your software in the internet - best source is http://www.google.com. Typically, it is a compressed file with an extension like tar.gz or tar.bz2. Use tar bunzip2 or unzip to extract the archive.

For example, download and unpack pingus:

wget http://pingus.seul.org/files/pingus-0.6.0-binary-linux-i386.tar.bz2
bunzip2 pingus-0.6.0-binary-linux-i386.tar.bz2
ls
tar xvf pingus-0.6.0-binary-linux-i386.tar
cd pingus-0.6.0

Look for a file named README or something similar- read this.

kwrite README

Now, you must run the configuration for the build and build it. You need to be superuser for it.

su -
./configure && make && make install

TroubleShooting

Most likely the configure script will fail because of missing dependencies to development packages. No worry, read and follow the hints at configure. You will also find examples there.

See also

• Installing Software
• build
• Compiling - same subject as this article
• gcc
• configure script
• make
• su
• root
• unzip
• tar
• cd
• less
• ls
• distcc