Building LMMS got quite simple since 0.4.0 as everything is managed by cmake now. Therefore make sure you have CMake (>= 2.6.0 recommended) and then run mkdir build cd build cmake ../ make sudo make install This way an out-of-tree build is performed. You can also run "cmake ." directly in the root of source-tree although this is not recommended. When performing an out-of-tree build after there's already an in-tree build, make sure to run "make distclean" before running cmake inside build-directory. If you want to use custom compiler flags simply set the environment variables CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS. After running cmake (the 3rd command above) you can see a summary of things that are going to be built into LMMS or built as plugins. Install the according libraries and development files if a certain feature is not enabled. Then remove CMakeCache.txt and run cmake again. If you want to supply an install prefix to cmake, add the flag: -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX= Where can be /usr, /usr/local, /opt, etc. The default is /usr/local.