Compiling on Linux

Open terminal as a regular user, not root.
Essentially, all you need is executing the following 3 commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Few possible issues 

Source files should be extracted on a Linux file system, and not as root, otherwise you may see the error:

./configure: Permission denied 
 

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configure: error: cannot run C compiled programs
 
make sure that you have "build-essential" package installed,
and don't use 'configure' or 'make' with 'sudo'.

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User is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

This means you need to add the current user to /etc/sudoers file, for example by opening it for editing as root and adding this:

user    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

(replace "user" with your actual user name).