Local Build of GNU autoconf and automake in CentOS

I was trying to build MediaTomb from the latest development source, and to do so, it required I have autoconf 2.61 and automate 1.10 installed. My Linux distribution of choice is CentOS. I was a dedicated Slackware user for many years, but opted to switch to a distribution with larger community support for easier availability of packages. I don’t mind building things from source code, but when something has 20-30 other dependencies, it can be a real waste of time. Ubuntu was plain awful when trying to get my home server set up, but CentOS has fit right in.

Back to the main topic, I had to get a more recent version of autoconf and automake to be able to generate the configure script for MediaTomb. The latest available official packages are autoconf-2.59-12 and automake-1.9.6-2.1. Since these packages are an integral part of building software on the system, I was hesitant to jump versions ahead of the rest of the packages. I try to keep my system in sync with the official package tree as much as possible. I typically only deviate to rpmforge for newer specialty packages.

To maintain the integrity of my system, I opted to install these packages under my local user folder. My procedure:

• Downloaded autoconf-2.61.tar.gz and automake-1.10.2.tar.gz from ftp.gnu.org
• Extracted both packages using tar -zxvf
• Run the autoconf configure script to use a local installation path: ./configure --prefix=/home/daniel/aconf/
• Run make && make install for autoconf
• Since the configure script for automake checks the autoconf version, override my default PATH to include the local bin folder for autoconf 2.61: PATH=/home/daniel/aconf/bin:$PATH
• Run the automake configure script to use a local installation path: ./configure --prefix=/home/daniel/aconf/
• Run make && make install for automake
• Finally, I used the local copy of autoreconf to create MediaTomb’s configure script.

Thought I'd share this in case anyone else comes across this mini speedbump, back to having fun with MediaTomb