One again, this site misses a lot of details, some of which are quite important: * build-essential - this actually installs what is considered "essential" for

One again, this site misses a lot of details, some of which are quite important: * build-essential - this actually installs what is considered "essential" for Debian packages. This happens to include some common compilers, other tools, and libraries, but also a bunch of junk you probably don't need. Still, this is harmless. * There is `pkg-config` for detailing dependencies that are already installed, there's just no standard way to automatically download and run code from the internet (and good riddance) * Sometimes you have to run `autoreconf -i` first to generate `configure` in the first place. This normally happens if you're running from a git clone rather than a tarball. Autotools is mostly useless if you're only working on Linux, marginally useful if you're also working on a different modern OS (especially since the first step is "install the GNU version of all the build tools"), but extremely useful if MyWeirdPrePosixProprietaryUnix. Despite this, `./configure` remains the single best interface for end-user installing - cmake in particular is an atrocity. * There is a little confusion about "build/host/target", due to the question "what machine am I running on, at what time?" If you aren't cross-compiling you can ignore all this though. * For more about `./configure` and `make` options, see https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Managing-Releases.html https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Managing-Releas... - there's also some good reference material in the documentation for `autotools` and `make`. I won't repeat all the things there, many of which people really need to learn before posting. * One annoying thing is that `./configure` and `make` disagree about whether libraries go in `LIBS` or `LDLIBS`. You should normally set variable for `./configure` so you don't have to remember them; one exception is `DESTDIR`. * `as` and `ld` are called internally by then compiler, you should never call them directly, since it needs to mangle flags. * The `checkinstall` tool, if supported for your distro, can help call `make install` in a way that uninstallation is reliable. * rpath is the correct solution instead of `LD_LIBRARY_PATH`, and can be automated based copying `-L` arguments to `-R`. There's some FUD floating around the internet, but it only affects `setuid` (and other privileged) packages on multiuser systems, and even then only if they set it to certain values.