This howto explains how you can compile a package from source and install it using your package manager so you can easily uninstall your package later (without leaving too many scattered files around.

Installing checkinstall

sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Compile from source

First of all get a program of your choice that you will compile from source. In the following example we will compile and install tmux, assuming that you already have libevent 1.4+ and ncurses installed (in the default locations).

cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/tmux/tmux-1.6.tar.gz
tar xvzf tmux-1.6.tar.gz
cd tmux-1.6
./configure
make
make test

Now instead of running make install we use checkinstall instead

checkinstall -D make install

Follow the interactive installation by providing package information. Once succesful you can see the package appear when doing dpkg -l.

To uninstall tmux again you can your package manager like dpkg or apt-get in debian based Unix OS’es