By now, you have probably chosen a FOSS project that interests you. Maybe you've been running that code from a pre-built binary that you downloaded, but now it's time to build the executables from scratch.

Go check out the project's codebase from its SCM. Walk through the entire build process. In some cases, this might be pretty simple; it some cases, it might be quite complicated. Use all of the tools available to you: install instructions, mailing lists, Google, IRC, etc. Build the code, and then run the code; that's your goal.

As you go through this build process, blog your process in a manner similar to how you walked through your build of Freeciv in this chapter.

If the build was easy, proceed to the next exercise: create two separate builds in two separate directories -- the latest stable release, and the release from HEAD. FOSS developers frequently do this to compare behaviors between versions.