Newbie question - building GDAL

[Gerhard Engel]

Hallo,

I am relatively new to the MapServer world and would like to display an
ArcInfo grid. My MS-version is 4.2.3 with input support for GDAL. I have
read most(?) of the documentation about displaying raster files but using
the GDAL library in practive is still unclear to me. Do I need to compile
the downloaded 1.2.1 library? If this is the case please be patient with my
ignorance, but: how do I compile this stuff?? - I've never had this to do
before so any instructions would be welcome.

Thanks for any help. Sorry for my holpriges English.

Gerhard