< Step 1. Unpacking >

Maybe you’ve already noticed that the package containing the source code of the program has a tar.gz or a tar.bz2 extension. This means that the package is a compressed tar archive, also known as a tarball. When making the package, the source code and the other needed files were piled together in a single tar archive, hence the tar extension. After piling them all together in the tar archive, the archive was compressed with gzip, hence the gz extension.

Some people want to compress the tar archive with bzip2 instead of gzip . In these cases the package has a tar.bz2 extension. You install these packages exactly the same way as tar.gz packages, but you use a bit different command when unpacking.

It doesn’t matter where you put the tarballs you download from the internet but I suggest creating a special directory for downloaded tarballs. In this tutorial I assume you keep tarballs in a directory called dls that you’ve created under your home directory. However, the dls directory is just an example. You can put your downloaded tar.gz or tar.bz2 software packages into any directory you want. In this example I assume your username is me and you’ve downloaded a package called pkg.tar.gz into the dls directory you’ve created (/home/me/dls).

Ok, finally on to unpacking the tarball. After downloading the package, you unpack it with this command:

[email protected]: ~/dls$ tar xvzf pkg.tar.gz

As you can see, you use the tar command with the appropriate options ( xvzf ) for unpacking the tarball. If you have a package with tar.bz2 extension instead, you must tell tar that this isn’t a gzipped tar archive. You do so by using the j option instead of z , like this:

[email protected]: ~/dls$ tar xvjf pkg.tar.bz2

What happens after unpacking, depends on the package, but in most cases a directory with the package’s name is created. The newly created directory goes under the directory where you are right now. To be sure, you can give the ls command:

[email protected]: ~/dls$ ls

pkg pkg.tar.gz

[email protected]: ~/dls$

In our example unpacking our package pkg.tar.gz did what expected and created a directory with the package’s name. Now you must cd into that newly created directory:

[email protected]: ~/dls$ cd pkg

[email protected]: ~/dls/pkg$

Read any documentation you find in this directory, like README or INSTALL files, before continuing!