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- On Linux, there are many ways

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you can work with software.

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One of the ways, and that's
how it originally started,

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is by installing software from source.

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Let me tell you,

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you are not going to do
that very often anymore,

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but I want you to understand
the different possibilities.

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So let me explain anyway.

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So what is installing
software from source?

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Well you remember Linux is open source,

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and open source means

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that the source code of software
may be provided in files.

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And if that is the case,

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then it is normally delivered
in a compressed tar ball.

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A tar ball, that's slang for an archive

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that is compressed with the tar utility.

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And in that tar ball
you can find anything.

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Sometimes you will find a
setup script to make it easy.

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In other cases, you will
just find source files

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and hopefully there's a readme
file that comes with it.

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Now, if you want to get
this on your computer,

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you need to install it,

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and installing it often
involves compiling.

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Now, what is compiling?

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Compiling is where you make
your software ready to run

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on a specific platform.

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And there is a reason
why you want to do that

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as a developer, because
if, as a developer,

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you deliver source code,

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then it's up to the user to make sure

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that the software is compiled
for their specific platform.

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As you can imagine,

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there's a difference if
you run Linux on a server

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or on an embedded device,
these are different platforms.

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And by compiling, you make sure

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that the software is working
on the target platform.

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In order to do the compiling,

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you will need different tools

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like the C compiler GCC
and the make utility.

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This approach does have
a couple of problems.

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The main disadvantage is

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that there is no central registration

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on your machine of software
that was installed this way.

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So there's no easy way to update.

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There's no easy way to uninstall.

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There's also no dependency handling.

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And really this is not
what you want to do.

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Fortunately, installation of software

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from source code has
not been the default way

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to work with software on
Linux for a long time.

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It has been followed
pretty soon by packages.