In a previous post, I gave you a little intro to compiling software from source code in Linux. What I might not have mentioned is that it does not always go smoothly without a hitch. If you are on a short timeline with your server and need software X immediately and building from source is your only option, you should know how to fix common problems.

One common errors that usually occurs during the “configure” stage is a missing library or program. If you get errors saying that a certain file or library could not be found, you most likely need to install it. In the easiest situations, finding the needed software package is just a matter of searching for the name. If it happens to be libopenal, you would just search for the right package and install the development version of it.

In other cases, you might have to search for the library within a package (i.e. libsuchandsuch.so.1). Depending on your distribution, there are package searching tools available online, or you can just search Google (or your preferred search engine) with the library name and the name of your distribution. With any luck, the next time you run configure, it will compile without any errors.

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Continue reading: How to fix common compiling problems in Linux

Ideally everything you ever need for your Linux server will be nicely packaged and easily installed through your distribution’s repositories. At worst you might need to add a third-party repository to download the .rpm or .deb packages that you need. But when you realize the world is not as perfect as that scenario, it might be helpful to know how to compile software from source. Don’t worry, it is easier than it sounds.

To begin you need to make sure your Linux distribution has the necessary libraries (usually -dev or -devel endings) to build software from source. In Redhat-based distros, you need the development tools:

# yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Next, download the program you want to install. It will typically be compressed in a tar.gz or tar.bz2 archive. You will need to uncompress them:

$ tar xvzf package.tar.gz
or
$ tar xvjf package.tar.bz2

Continue reading: How to compile and install software from source in Linux