We will put the source code in the target /usr/src directory.
So for example, if your target file system is mounted on /mnt/target
and your tarballs are in /root, you would do
cd /mnt/target/usr/src
tar -xzvf /root/MAKEDEV-2.5.tar.gz
Don't be completely lame and copy the tarball to the place where you are going to extract it ;->
Normally when you install software, you are installing it onto the system
that is running. We don't want to do that though, we want to install it
as though /mnt/target is the root filesystem. Different packages
have different ways of letting you do this. For MAKEDEV you do
ROOT=/mnt/target make install
You need to look out for these options in the README and INSTALL files
or by doing a ./configure --help.
Have a look in MAKEDEV's Makefile to see what it does with the
ROOT varible that we set in that command. Then have a look
in the man page by doing man ./MAKEDEV.man to see how it
works. You'll find that the way to make our device files is to
cd /mnt/target/dev and do ./MAKEDEV generic.
Do an ls to see all the wonderful device files it has made
for you.