For the cmake packages

Let us suppose that we need to install the package foo-1.00.tar.gz. You have to be root for that

Download the file, and then

tar zxvf foo-1.00.tar.gz
cd foo-1.00/build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
make install

Warning If you have a Fedora 64bit distribution, the call to cmake should rather be this one :

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DLIB_SUFFIX=64

For the autotools packages (if any, we rather use cmake now)

Let us suppose that we need to install the package foo-1.00.tar.gz. You have to be root for that

Download the file, and then

tar zxvf foo-1.00.tar.gz
cd foo-1.00
./configure --prefix=/usr
make install

Warning If you have a 64bit distribution, the call to configure should rather be this one :

./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64