Install?

[andy baxter]

Willis wrote:
> Caleb Marcus wrote:
>   
>> On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 00:23 -0600, Willis wrote:
>>     
>>> Thanks Tony.  I have the Gnome Bible and it is not satisfactory at all 
>>> for serious work and when I apt-get the Bibletime the Adept Manager 
>>> reports it is unable to find it.
>>>
>>> As for the ter balls I have unzipped them to files and found nothing to 
>>> install them with and I just put them into a directory to wait for an 
>>> answer.
>>>
>>>     
>>>       
>> What game, and what's the name of the bible program? 
>>     
> Ubuntu Linux Bible and Flight Gear-0.9.10.  Please bear with me and help 
> me learn what to do with a tar ball and do not try to teach me the local 
> idiot way of doing this.  I know Windows inside out and I am abandoning 
> MS in favor of Linux and I'm not the type that ever trys to insist that 
> everything be perfectly simple.  I enjoy a challenge.
>   
A tarball is a compressed archive of files and no more. It may contain 
various things - there could be an installer, but more usual is for it 
to contain either raw data files, if you're just downloading something 
like the bible data, or else a program that you usually need to compile 
before you can install it.

In the second case, look for a script in the top level of the unpacked 
tarball called 'configure' - usually what you need to do is something like:

sudo -i
cd <path to unpacked tarball>
./configure --help
# now read the help before doing
./configure <any options you want to add>
make
make install

This will compile the program and install it - usually to /usr/local/bin.

andy