Those people who have built a LFS system will be aware of the general principles of downloading and unpacking software. We will however repeat some of that information here for those new to building their own software. One difference from the LFS book is that we do not mirror the packages on the BLFS website. Instead, each set of installation instructions contains a URL from which you can download the package. We do however keep a selection of patches available via http/ftp. These are referenced as needed in the installation instructions. Whilst you can keep the source tarballs anywhere you like, we assume that you have unpacked them and unzipped any required patches into /usr/src. We can not emphasise strongly enough that you should start from a clean source tree each time. This means that if you have had an error, it's usually best to delete the source tree and re-unpack it before trying again. This obviously doesn't apply if you're an advanced user used to hacking Makefiles and C code, but if in doubt, start from a clean tree. If a file is tar'ed and gzip'ed, it is unpacked by running one of the following two commands, depending on the filename: tar xvzf filename.tar.gz tar xvzf filename.tgz tar xvzf filename.tar.Z If a file is tar'ed and bzip2'ed, it can usually be unpacked by running: tar jxvf filename.tar.bz2 This applies as long as you patched tar to include the j option during your LFS install. If you didn't, you can use a slightly different method: bzcat filename.tar.bz2 | tar xv Finally, you need to be able to unpack patches which are generally not tar'd. The best way to do this is to copy the patch file to /usr/src and then to run one of the following commands depending on whether the file is .gz or .bz2: gunzip patchname.gz bunzip2 patchname.bz2