GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Building Packages

Sometimes the binary distribution of the package is configured or compiled with options that don't suit you. Or it may be compiled for a more recent release than that which you are using and does not work for your release. Normally you would then be left on your own to retrieve the source of the package, configure and compile it, then install it into /usr/local/. This is then outside of the Debian package management system, which is just fine. But there are better solutions. One is to tune a specific source package and build a Debian package from it. The second is to specify general configuration options for your system and then rebuild many packages to with these options.

Subsections

• Building Packages from Source
• Build Architecture Optimised Packages
• Pinning Distributions