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What are "build-essential" & "build-dep"?

Fresh7 days ago
Mar 15, 2026174440 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I am researching how to install Ruby 1.9.1 in Xubuntu 10.04 and I came across the command build-essential and build-dep multiple times. Sometimes it is followed by packages and sometimes it is both preceded and post-ceded by packages. The 2 examples I am looking at are: sudo apt-get install build-essential zlib1g zlib1g-dev zlibc libruby1.9 libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev sudo apt-get build-dep ruby1.9 and sudo apt-get install ruby irb ri rdoc ruby1.8-dev libzlib-ruby libyaml-ruby libreadline-ruby libncurses-ruby libcurses-ruby libruby libruby-extras libfcgi-ruby1.8 build-essential libopenssl-ruby libdbm-ruby libdbi-ruby libdbd-sqlite3-ruby sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libsqlite3-ruby libxml-ruby libxml2-dev

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Fix for: What are "build-essential" & "build-dep"?

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The command means "As root, install all dependencies for 'packagename' so that I can build it". So build-dep is an apt-get command just like install, remove, update, etc. is a package which contains references to numerous packages needed for building software in general.

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