Well I've searched around a fair bit about the dangers of installing as root, and understand that you shouldn't use root until you have to make install. However, the /usr/src directory has write access disabled for all but root. So how am I supposed to compile the source as a user if I can't even extract the source to the directory? I suppose that I could extract the source as root and then run the commands as a user? I am unclear as to whether these commands will fail though since they can't write files to that directory.

For example, I just installed the latest release of ALSA and it works. However, I went through the whole procedure as root. The ALSA driver works on my user account, so I don't know if it's really necessary to uninstall and start over from a user account. I'm running Slackware 10.0 btw.

Two methods come to mind:

1. Have a normal user download the tarball, extract it within his/her own home directory, execute the configure script, and then issue make. Then when you want to install, become root, issue the "make install" and move the source to /usr/src or wherever you want to keep it. There's no rule that says the source must be compiled from the same directory you store it.

2. Change the permissions of /usr/src to something like root:softinst (root=owner, softinst=group). Change the permissions to 77X (where X can be whatever you want, but I would suggest 0). Make a regular user part of the softinst group and re-logon with that user. Then all members of the softinst group can save/extract tarballs inside the /usr/src directory

Thanks for the help. I was uncertain if the source files were supposed to be in the src directory for any reason other than convention. I think I might go with your second suggestion, as it seems a bit more convenient after I get it setup.

Generally speaking, yes, convention suggests you keep any source trees inside an src directory (/usr/src, /usr/local/src, etc.) In fact, the convention goes so far as to suggest placing source trees for basic system programs in /usr/src (the kernel, core utility packages, and anything else needed to boot the system into a rescue mode), and that everything else should be installed in /usr/local/src. Part of that reasoning is, distributions are not supposed to touch anything in the /usr/local tree. So you could (in theory) reinstall a distro or install an entirely new one and everything in /usr/local would remain intact. It's not quite that simple, but that's the idea.

Also, you don't have to keep source tree around if you don't want to. You can re-tar them, and stick them somewhere (like /usr/local/src/tarballs) or you could just delete them entriely. I only keep the kernel source and anything I've hacked on. I re-tar everything else.

Great, thanks for your help. That clears up a lot of my questions.