Description of problem:

Second code snippet in procedure 3.2 contains the following statement:

# tar -jxf git-1.7.6.1.tar.gz

This cannot work, because -j option works with tar.bz2 files, while the archive is tar.gz (and git upstream provides tag.gz as well):

# tar -jxf git-1.7.7.3.tar.gz 
bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file.
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

the correct command is using -z:

# tar -zxf git-1.7.6.1.tar.gz