compile thunderbird in Suse 10

Hi guys
I have been using Thunderbird as my default E mail reader on Windoze Xp
for the last two years or so and think it’s really good it certainly
gets rid of the Junk mail. My question is that I am now running Linux
Suse 10 and want to transfer E-mails and start to use Thunderbird on
this distribution. So I suppose what I am asking is how do you compile
Thunderbird in Linux . I am quite new to Linux and not confident yet
with the command names and uses. I have done a search on Internet and
news groups but not found the answer yet. I have downloaded zipped up
file and extracted this (the source code,I presume). Do I need to
install some compiler software to get this to work?
Thank you for any advice you can give me.
Paul