Have been trying to use the Community Ubuntu Documentation:
CompilingEasyHowTo... How do I build a common directory to build
packages: /usr/local/src... It does not respond to any of these
commands...

"You should then build a common directory for yourself where you'll be
building these packages. We recommend creating /usr/local/src, but
really you can put it anywhere you want. Make sure this directory is
writable by your primary user account, by running

sudo chown yourusername /usr/local/src

and, just to be safe

sudo chmod u+rwx /usr/local/src

After you've done this, you're set up to start getting the programs
you need.

Step 2: Getting the software you want

Most of the software you'll generally want comes from released
tarballs. These are just compressed archives with extensions like
.tar.gz or .tar.bz2 — they are just like .zip files on Windows or .sit
on MacOS X, if that analogy helps you. If the program you want to
install comes in this form, you should move it into the /usr/local/src
directory we made in Step 1 and extract it by right-clicking on the
file and selecting Extract Here, or by using the command line: If your
tarball is a .gz, extract the files with the command:

tar xzvf tarballname.tar.gz

and for bz2 the similar command:

tar xjvf tarballname.tar.bz2"

It's kind of driving me crazy!