Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Compiling from a Tarball

Most source code that is not in the Ubuntu repositories is available from the original writer or from a company’s website as compressed source tarballs—that is, tar files that have been compressed using gzip or bzip. The compressed files typically uncompress into a directory containing several files. It is always a good idea to compile source code as a regular user to limit any damage that broken or malicious code might inflict, so create a directory named source in your home directory.

From wherever you downloaded the source tarball, uncompress it into the ~/source directory using the -C option to tar:

matthew@seymour:~$ tar zxvf packagename.tgz -C ~/sourcematthew@seymour:~$ tar zxvf packagename.tar.gz -C ~/sourcematthew@seymour:~$ ...