The Hannibal team tries to make use of existing binary software packages that form part of the Debian stable repositories as much as possible. However, some software just isn't available at the required version/patch-level or isn't available at all within the Debian stable repositories. In this case it might be required to (re)build binary packages ourselves from a source package or to manually compile software that isn't available as a Debian package at all.
As we usually don't want to have development tools en software sources installed on our production servers, we build packages and compile software on a separate Development server. As you might guess, we use a Xen instance for this purpose.
Start to install a minimal Debian server as described at the Hannibal Linux core section.
Now we have to add the Debian source repository to /etc/apt/sources.list (this example is localized for The Netherlands, adjust to your Debian mirror of choice).
deb-src http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian etch main contrib
Afterwards run:
apt-get update
Install some tools that enable compiling software and building Debian packages:
apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dh-make alien lintian autoconf automake
A good guide on howto build binary packages from source on Debian is available at http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-pkg_basics.en.html#s-sourcepkgs