Hi,
It's all very simple all you have to do is follow this instruction.
If you download .gz do: -- tar xvzf filename.tar.gz
If you download .bz2 do: -- bzip2 -d filename.tar.bz2
then -- tar xvf filename.tar
After extracting the files, for a simple way to compile go into the directory you just extracted and type in:
./configure -- wait it's completion
then
make -- wait it's completion
then
make install
All going well it's now installed. But I can tell you that lots of people are having problems installing and compiling .8 beta.
Good luck