Published at LXer:

Building software from source - that's a bit old-school, isn't it? Who wants to wrestle with the command line, hunting down dependencies and coaxing the GCC compiler into running properly? Well, it does sound like a strange thing to do in this world of binary packages and online repositories. We have thousands of packages available via the internet, all neatly compiled for our distros, thereby usually nullifying the need to get down and dirty with a Makefile. As great as they are, binary packages have a lot of limitations that can only be overcome by compiling a program from its source code. To prove that it's not quite as difficult as it sounds, let's see how this works. We're going to take a stock, unmodified Ubuntu 8.04 installation and install the Audacity sound editor, enabling some extra features along the way.

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