Vern:
Sometimes a tar.gz file contains a full path tree and files similar to how
Slackware does installs. You simply cd / as the root user and run tar -xzf
yourfile.tar.gz and everything goes to the correct location on your drive.
Other times a tar.gz (or .tgz) file has only a relative path tree in it
(meaning a folder) and when you run tar -xzf yourfile.tar.gz you get a
folder wherever you ran the command. In this case, if you cd into this
folder you'll often times see an install script, or maybe the software needs
to be compiled before you can use it. This often leads to the commands
".configure;make;make install" for software that was packaged using autoconf
(which is a lot of what's out there). If the software must be compiled, you
need to have a full development environment on the system - this is often
the case if you did the default install for your distribution.
It should be noted that software installed by means other than using a
package (rpm or whatever) won't later be recognized by your package manager
as being installed. You'll need to uninstall it manually when you don't want
it anymore.
Anyhow, the safest way to tell which scenario is the case is to run the
command tar -tzf yourfile.tar.gz to see what's in it before doing anything.
You might need to pipe the output from tar to less so that you an page
through the contents and see what's going on.
Knowing how to deal with software that needs to be compiled or figure out
alternate installation procedures is definitely an important skill when
using any *nix type OS. You'll find that there's an awful lot of software
out there that's not in a ready-to-install compatible package format for
your distribution. At least I did ( I also started with Red Hat, but I like
Debian MUCH better now).
Hope this little introduction helps.
Jason
> ----------
> From: Vern W Heesch
> Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Saturday, July 15, 2000 11:34 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Installing
>
> I am really new to Linux and have been dealing with RPM's up till now,
> how do I install a tar.gz file? Sorry for such a stupid question.
>
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