[NBLUG/talk] New to Linux

Tom Haddon tom at greenleaftech.net
Sat Oct 27 21:54:15 PDT 2007


On Sat, 2007-10-27 at 21:32 -0700, E Frank Ball III wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 09:26:49PM -0700, E Frank Ball wrote:
>  > On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 08:49:06PM -0700, Milton Rojas wrote:
>  >  > Thanks for your help.
>  >  > Another problem I'm facing is how to correctly uncompress .tar.gz files such
>  >  > that they can be installed, if they need to do so.
>  > 
>  > 
>  > tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz
>  > 
>  > see "man tar" for more info
> 
> 
> I should add, that if you just want to uncompress, without
> disturbing the tar archive use:
> 
> gunzip filename.tar.gz
> 
> which will leave filename.tar

What you do from there (after uncompressing the tarball) depends on what
you have ucompressed. If it's source code for a program, and you need to
compile it, you can do the following

./configure
make
sudo make install

If you're new to Linux (and even if you're not), I'd recommend avoiding
this route though. I'd try to have all programs you use installed as
packages managed by your operating system (if this is Fedora, these will
be rpm's). This way, any updates and conflicts are managed by the OS,
and if anything is depedent on specific libraries or kernel versions, it
won't mysterious break when you upgrade a part of your system.

For someone coming from a Windows background, this is a foreign concept,
but these days there are very few things that you'd want to install that
aren't available as packages either directly distributed by your OS or
in an rpm/deb format that means you can install with one click and have
automatic dependency checking, etc.

Hope that helps, 

Thanks, Tom

-- 


----------------------------------
Tom Haddon
mailto:tom at greenleaftech.net
m +1.415.830.6822
www.greenleaftech.net




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