- On Linux, there are many ways
you can work with software.
One of the ways, and that's how it originally started,
is by installing software from source.
Let me tell you,
you are not going to do that very often anymore,
but I want you to understand the different possibilities.
So let me explain anyway.
So what is installing software from source?
Well you remember Linux is open source,
and open source means
that the source code of software may be provided in files.
And if that is the case,
then it is normally delivered in a compressed tar ball.
A tar ball, that's slang for an archive
that is compressed with the tar utility.
And in that tar ball you can find anything.
Sometimes you will find a setup script to make it easy.
In other cases, you will just find source files
and hopefully there's a readme file that comes with it.
Now, if you want to get this on your computer,
you need to install it,
and installing it often involves compiling.
Now, what is compiling?
Compiling is where you make your software ready to run
on a specific platform.
And there is a reason why you want to do that
as a developer, because if, as a developer,
you deliver source code,
then it's up to the user to make sure
that the software is compiled for their specific platform.
As you can imagine,
there's a difference if you run Linux on a server
or on an embedded device, these are different platforms.
And by compiling, you make sure
that the software is working on the target platform.
In order to do the compiling,
you will need different tools
like the C compiler GCC and the make utility.
This approach does have a couple of problems.
The main disadvantage is
that there is no central registration
on your machine of software that was installed this way.
So there's no easy way to update.
There's no easy way to uninstall.
There's also no dependency handling.
And really this is not what you want to do.
Fortunately, installation of software
from source code has not been the default way
to work with software on Linux for a long time.
It has been followed pretty soon by packages.