Installing GCC and GNU Make

In this section, we will install the essential tools that we'll need throughout this book; namely, GCC, the compiler. It's the compiler that turns the C source code into a binary program that we can run on the system. All the C code that we write will need to be compiled.

We'll also install GNU Make, a tool that we'll be using later on to automate how projects containing more than one source file are compiled.

Getting ready

Since we are installing software on the system, we'll need to be using either the root user or a user with sudo privileges. I will be using sudo in this recipe, but if you are on a system without sudo, you can switch to the root user with su before entering the commands (and then leave out sudo).

How to do it…

We will be installing what is called a meta-package or a group, a package that contains a collection of other packages. This meta-package includes both GCC, GNU Make, several manual...