To build everything and create an generic installer for linux, do this: Download and run the script from CVS which will download all the sources from anonymous CVS: scripts/checkout-developer-layout.sh Now you will have all of the sources in a directory called "pure-data". Next, run these commands to build in the package: cd packages/linux_make make install It will then compile and install everything into packages/linux_make/build. The default installation prefix is "/usr/local". Pd will need to be installed into that directory in order for it to find all its externals and docs. You can compile everything to use a different prefix like this: make install prefix=/usr After you have everything built, you can make a tarball with a generated Makefile which will install and uninstall everything: make tarbz2 You can generate just the Makefile used for installation using: make installer_makefile