Ubuntu Unleashed 2015 Edition: Covering 14.10 and 15.04, Tenth 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:

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