There are situations when we have to install a program from source, because the given package isn't available in the distribution, or we need a non-standard compilation of that program; however, frequent installations of programs from source can cause a bit of a mess in our system. Removing programs installed from self-compiled sources is often troublesome. CheckInstall is a very good way to keep the system tidy. Checkinstall is a tool for automatically building packages for the Slackware (.tgz), Debian (.deb), and RedHat/Suse (.rpm) distributions from source. So much for the theory - I'll show the practical use of the Checkinstall program in the following steps:

• ./configure
• make
• checkinstall

CheckInstall is an excellent tool that can make Linux administration much easier. Especially when programs have to be compiled from source frequently. CheckInstall gives you the ability to safely remove programs without risking the integrity of the system.