Installing

[Gosha]

hi, first ide like to mention how much this discussion board has helped me! ITS INCREDIBLE! thank you all so much.......no for my question....this might be a stupid question but how do install tar.gz files on linux? (like moonlight3d?) andother question is how do i compile programs (like XFRisk)?

thanx in advance

[Ardith]

To uncompress tar.gz files use the command:
tar -xzvf thetar.gz-file
This ungzips and untars in one step.
If for some reason you want to do it separately, you use these commands:
gzip -d thetar.gz-file
tar -xvf thetar-file

When you need to compile a program it should have a README file saying how to do this. It usually takes the form of 'make theprogram' with maybe a 'make config' before that. It varies from program to program, so you should look at the README.

Whoops! Just realized I didn't put the 'f' last. Sorry about that!

[This message has been edited by Ardith (edited 03-17-2000).]

[Toby]

This is considered cheating by purists, and you should learn to do things "right" as well, but here goes:

1) You can get gxtar (for GNOME) or the KDE Archiver and work like with Winzip (not really, but at least the extracting part is fine); also, for GNOME you can get the "GIP" installer, which installs stuff from the sources - it is in an early stage of development, sometimes works, sometimes not.

2) Make aliases for the gunzip and untar (and gzip and tar, and whatever complicated stuff happens to bother you) named "extract" or whatever you like. Most make some aliases anyway - many people have "x" for "startx", "u" for "cd .." and so on

Note that this way you'll never learn the original stuff, which is why I don't feel very good about this advice; however, this is what you _can_ do - it's up to you.

Toby