Building Applications from Source

Make sure you have all the components installed for building applications from source code

apt-get install build-essential

Unpack the applications ''tarball'' , I am using DOSBox in this example which I downloaded from the DOSBox homepage.

tar zxvf dosbox-0.70.tar.gz

The unpacking will make a folder called dosbox-0.70/ , change to this folder with :-

cd dosbox-0.70/

Now we need to configure the build process for your hardware / software setup with :-

./configure

Hopefully this will complete without any problems , sometimes you will be missing a dependancy and will have to install that before trying configure again.
DOSBox depends on the libsdl1.2-dev library , so I needed to install that before configure would complete fully.

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev

Now we just build the code with make

make

When this completes you can install it to the hard disk with :-

sudo make install

We have to use the sudo command as it needs root access to install

Now that the DOSBox application has been built you can try it by running the dosbox command from a shell , like this :-

dosbox

Easy.

Source Code Tricks and Tips