various "what is this? / what does this do?" questions

[LooseCanon]

Hello.

Not sure whether this is the right forum but here goes.

I'm new to Linux and I have a ton of questions. It's odd that I could install Linux/WinXP dual boot, make the appropriate partitions but there are things that I just don't know where to start looking for answers.

1) what is X11 or X86Config (?) and how do I find out what version it is that I have?

2) tar, tz, gzip are compressed archive files - that I know. But how do I handle files I download off the net - like "whatever-2003-1.02.1234-blabla.tar.gz"

3) what the heck is a "tarball"??

4) what are "RPM" files and how do I handle/install those?

5) What exactly is "compiling" and how do I do that?

I'l stop there, that will be enough homework for a while :D - I really appreciate all your help in these forums!

[ricstr]

1) X11 is a windowing system, XFree86 is another windowing system compatable with X11, You can read on the there website about it:
http://www.xfree86.org/#whatis
http://www.x.org/X11.html

XF86Config is what you use to setup or change the configuration.


2) To uncompress these archives you can use the following from the command line:

$ tar xvzf foo.tar.gz

or

gunzip foo.tar.gz
$ tar xvf foo.tar



3) A traball is the archive that is created with tar utility.
In the last step you uncompressed your tarball.


4) RPM is Red hat Package Managment. Its another method of installing packages on a Red Hat based distro (SuSE, Mandrake, JAMD). You should have tools with your distro to install these.


5) Compiling, is building a program from its source code. Most source code it packaged in a tarball. Follow steps above to uncopmress it and then move into the uncompressed directory.
There is four steps to compiling source code.

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ make clean


have a look at this from the libary which may give you more information.

http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Software/Compiling_Software.html

[o0zi]

Source code, or the text that programs are created from, has to be compiled before it can run on your computer. Unlike Windows, Linux software normally has to be compiled by the user, whereas in Windows it's already been compiled.
Software that has to be compiled usually comes in .tar.gz files on Linux. These are compressed, and to decompress them you use the following command:
tar zvxf whatever.tar.gz
This first decompresses the .gz part using the gzip command, and then de-tars the .tar part using the tar command.
A tarball is a ".tar.gz" file.

Once the tarball has been extracted, you have to compile the software. This is usually done with the commands:
./configure
make
make install

./configure checks what hardware and software are available on your system, make compiles the software, and make install puts it in the right place on your system. After that long process, the software should be installed:)

With RPMs, you don't have to do any compiling, like Windows. You just install one with the command:

rpm -Ivh whatever.rpm

and that's it.

[mdwatts]

Most if not all of those questions can be answered by searching the JL forums, reviewing ALL the JL Help Files, reading the online documentation your distro provides, using the manpages (man rpm & man tar) and searching www.google.com/linux for guides/tutorials/how-tos'.