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

Compiling from Source from the Ubuntu Repositories

You might sometimes want to recompile a package, even though a binary package is available in the Ubuntu repositories. For example, a program might have been compiled into a binary with a specific feature disabled that you would like to use. Here is how you can do this. We will call the software package we want to compile foo.

First, get the source from the Ubuntu repositories:

matthew@seymour:~$ apt-get source foo

Install the build dependencies for the package:

matthew@seymour:~$ sudo apt-get build-dep foo

Change to the directory for the source code (may include the version number):

matthew@seymour:~$ cd foo-4.5.2

Make whatever changes you want to make to the package or to the compilation flags. ...