Being a Debian user, I don’t make a habit of compiling things by hand and on those occasions when I do need to do so, I usually use apt-build (good article, though a bit old here). However, today I had to get a particularly odd shared library with a very specific version to match a production environment we have at work. So, I downloaded the tarball, which was quite large, and then compiled it. Which took four and a half minutes on my dual-core (1.83GHz) ThinkPad running make -j 4 which isn’t all that slow, really. Once it was completed, I looked around (grepped around) for the output file and was dismayed to discover that there weren’t any. After tinkering around for about an hour, I finally figured out that you can request shared libraries be built by providing an option to the configure script: ./configure --enable-shared Shortly thereafter, I got the shared library version I needed and was on the road again. Just a useful tip which I hope can be of help to someone.