How to complile and install programs in linux

So you have a tar.gz file and you want to compile and install it.. To do that you need the gcc compiler (not always but its good to have anyways)…

apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Cool, we have gcc and other essential build tools… cd into the directory with the tar.gz file and type the following

tar -xzvf myprogram.tar.gz
cd myprogram
./configure
make
make install

That should pretty much do it… of course, depending on what you are compiling the steps may be a bit different but more often than not there is a readme file in the extracted folder if you ever need to do extra configuration.