Before yum and when I used to have time for it, I compiled from source everything on my machine. It wasn't that big of a deal. Just took some time. The pay-off was significant in performance and speed... reason being that, if you configure gcc for your particular cpu, the code is able to take advantage of the hard-wired instruction set particular to your cpu which don't exist in the generic cpu the repo binaries are compiled for. IIRC, just to get the source code out of an rpm you could download the source rpm and simply do rpm -i /path/to/package.src.rpm or in one step do rpm -i ftp://path/to/package.src.rpm Alternatively, you could also check out Slackware. The last time I looked at it (several years ago) it didn't use rpm or apt or any package management system at all, just tgz files. This is what Linux used to be before there was a redhat... and it's generally how code files are handled in development before they become rpms... or whatever. Source code shouldn't scare anyone. It's interesting stuff and harmless... just text files, after all. If your students are going to hack around with it and compile it (which I would hope they would do), then of course you'll want to take appropriate measures. More people should be doing this kind of stuff. The world needs more open source developers. Looking at existing code is a great tool for learning.