First obtain one of the compressed source distributions above. I will assume that you grabbed the bzip'd file (cidentd-0.2.1.tar.bz2). Uncompress it: bunzip2 cidentd-0.2.1.tar.bz2 This leaves you with the file "cidentd-0.2.1.tar" Add the spec file: tar -rf cidentd-0.2.1.tar cidentd.spec You may then use rpmbuild (with one of the -t options) to create an rpm. Most likely you will want to install, so you would do rpmbuild -tb cidentd-0.2.1.tar Consult the rpmbuild manpage for more information.