Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

For most Linux programs (certainly of the C variety), this pattern is fairly standard. Copy down the source code, configure it with its defaults (or make any changes that you want), compile the software, and install it variously on the filesystem.

The INSTALL file provides a good overview of the different steps, but in short, they look like this:

• configure: Creates a Makefile that contains system-specific options, based on your environment. These can be quite long; the htop file comes out at 1,422 lines.
• make: This is invoked to correctly compile any source code that needs it, creating binaries and supplementing files that might be needed.
• make install: This puts the files into their appropriate places.

Easy, right?