Some times you may find it hard to locate binaries for your Linux distribution (Of course, you will not have this problem if you are looking for a popular software). This edition of techblog tells about the ways to install a software from its source files.

In this tutorial I’m going to install pidgin from itself source files. You can download pidgin from sourceforge (You may note that Pidgin is popular software and is available in the repositories of all the popular Linux distributions).

The first thing that you need to take care of the compiler specific libraries.

If you are using a debian based distro you can issue

sudo apt-get install build-essential

If you are using any other distro you will have to refer to your distribution’s man/help files.

You may also install other libraries like libglib2.0-dev and libgtk2.0-dev so that you won’t get any dependency related error

Now you can change the directory to the one to which you have downloaded the file

$ cd ./path_to_your_download_directory

Then you need to untar the tar (zipped) file. As this is a tar.bz2 file you can issue:

tar –xvjf your_file.tar.bz2

(Another common extension is tar.gz – you can use tar –xvfz for untarring such files)

Now you can issue:

./configure

Finally issue:

make

sudo make install

Other ways:

There are many websites that offers binaries specific to your distribution. Getdeb is one among them. There are other solutions that can convert files in one binary format to another. Alien is such type of solution which can convert RPM files to deb files.