Installing from source

["William P Martin" <wpmartin@pe.net>]

Hi all,

I am currently building a server based on potato. The three servers I am
going to be running on the box with be bind,apache, and sendmail. I am doing
this for experience and as a project given to me by the admins at work so
that I can learn, screw up and ask them questions.
Their recommendation is to build all of these from source so I have
familiarity with where the tarballs put the files by default and getting
experience setting them up by hand. My question is do I need to do anything
special for these three. I have installed them from deb's with very little
difficulty. But is there any prereq's that I may need that aren't obvious.
And could I install the newest versions of these on a potato box?

Thanks in advance.

Pat