Compiling third-party software

Sometimes, a package for a certain application is just not available – either nobody bothered to create it, or that application is so old that it's obsolete and nobody wants to do it. Either way, if an application is useful to us, there's no reason why we shouldn't try to find its source code and compile it.

Compiling software from source code can sometimes be like dark magic, and we have a good example coming up very soon. Sometimes it works without any real effort, and we are going to show you an example of that, too. The main distinction between those two scenarios seems to be the all-important dependencies and their version. Also, there's a lot of software for Linux that needs to be compiled in a specific sequence. A perfect example of that is the LAMP stack. After installing Linux, if you want to compile Apache, MySQL, and PHP, you had better do it in the correct order. Otherwise, your keyboard might find its way to...