tarballs and rpm's

[Derek Broughton]

John B. Pace wrote:

> I'm looking for assistance to dealing with tarballs and rpm's. I haven't
> been around linux in some 10 years and at 54 my memory is quite fuzzy.
> Actually the last time around I had a lot of difficulties until I had to
> give up. Not this time. I've got a lot figured out, but have more, of
> course--like those tar.gz and rpm files. How does one install them? 

Generally, one doesn't.  You try to get .deb packages.  If you _have_ to
install an rpm, you should use "alien" to convert it to a deb package
first.  If it's a tarball, you just untar it, and do "./configure; make;
sudo make install" in the unpacked directory.  Of course, it fails if you
don't have all your dependencies installed...  primarily you will need to
install the "build-essentials" package.
-- 
derek