First we use a patch to bison, backported from CVS, which fixes a minor compilation problem with some packages: patch -Np1 -i ../&bison-patch; Prepare Bison for compilation: ./configure --prefix=/usr Compile the package: make This package has a test suite available which can perform a number of checks to ensure it built correctly. Should you choose to run it, the following command will do so (and takes a long time): make check And install the package: make install