Could you please post the tail (i.e. last 10 or so lines) of the error messages you're getting? (hint: you can select from the terminal and middle click in a text box to copy and paste). Anyway, if this helps:
When you build a tarball, you typically run the following commands:
Code:
./configure
make
sudo make install
though there are occasionally variations such as alternative build systems.
If you don't type the 'sudo', it will try to install with user permissions (regular users aren't allowed to install; they need superuser permission).
You are likely running into dependency problems (i.e. packages that aren't installed that need to be). This is where you use apt-get to resolve them by installing the necessary -dev packages. For instance, if the ./configure fails because you don't have Tcl/Tk, you can install them by running:
Code:
sudo apt-get install tcl8.4-dev tk8.4-dev
If you need to know the name of a package, you can type:
Code:
apt-cache search tcl
This will spew a lot of results. To refine a bit, you can pipe it through grep:
Code:
apt-cache search tcl | grep dev
If you are new and want to know details about commands, you can access the man pages like this: