Installing applications from tarballs

Even though the RPM Pacckage Manager (RPM) has quickly become pretty much
standard in many Linux distributions (Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake…),
you may still come across files with a .tar.gz or .tgz extension from time
to time. If you run Slackware, you definitely will see these files, since
it is the default file type still used by that distribution to install
packages. So, what do you need to do in order to install these traditional
UNIX packages also referred to as tarballs? That\’s precisely what
I try to address in this short article.

To start with, a tarball is a compressed file that you need to decompress
before compiling and installing. In the case of Red Hat you can take the
file to /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES (/usr/src/OpenLinux/SOURCES, in the case
of Caldera), and proceed to untar the file there. However, it doesn\’t
really matter where you untar it in most cases, since the installation
script is usually intelligent enough to install every file into its proper
location.

Once the tarball has been moved to the desired directory, you can proceed
to uncompress it:
tar xzvf filename-0.2.3.tar.gz

This should create a directory (usually named after the first part of the
tarball, which in our example would be filename-0.2.3). You
need to descend into that directory with the cd command. Once
there, it is always a good idea to read the README or
INSTALL file, since they may contain important information that
you should be aware of. In some cases, they even include additional
information on how to customize the application that you are about to
install.

Now, we are ready to run the configuration script:
./configure
Please, note that you need to add ./ in front of the
configure command. This is necessary in order to tell the shell to run
the command from the current directory regardless of your path settings.

Usually, after you run the configuration script you should see a bunch
of lines scrolling through the screen. If you take the time to read them
closely, they usually print out comments as the configuration script
checks for files, directories and libraries that are necessary for the
installation of the program, and then it may also proceed to create a
Makefile that will be used at compilation time.

Assuming that everything worked so far, you should be ready to compile and
install by running the following commands:


make
make install

If everything works now and you don\’t see any false exit, the program
has been installed and you should be able to run it. Please, keep in
mind that certain programs do not install in your path and you may need
to either add them to your shell\’s path or simply run them by providing the
absolute path to the binary.