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 ...
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