Linux Mint Forums

virtualandi wrote:its vmware workstation 6

Try virtualbox ... it performs waaaay better! And it's available via Synaptic .... Just point and click, "Apply", and voila, application installed.

*.tar.gz files are GNU zipped (gzip) "UNIX Tape Archives" (tar), a compression format very common on UNIX-like platforms. It's widely used and actually very easy to handle (excellent for backups!), e.g. it can be read on almost every OS (Linux, Windows, Mac OS, BeOS, OS/2, ... ) and on every platform (Intel, PowerPC, SPARC, HP PA-RISC ...). So if software gets delivered in a *.tar.gz file you obviously have to unpack it somewhere, then go into that place where things got unpacked (usually this would be a new sub-directory), and then launch the actual installer, usually some sort of script that will auto-guess the correct settings and just install what it needs to install. Such installer scripts are best launched in the terminal, e.g. After the installer script has finished without spitting out an error it's usually safe to remove that sub-directory, it shouldn't be needed any longer.

In the case of VMware I am absolutely confident that there are detailed instructions on their web site and I think there should be a README file somewhere somehow, so I suggest you read those things

virtualandi wrote: virtualbox doesnt seem to be in my synaptic!

http://www.getautomatix.com

I got mine from their repos. Add this into your /etc/apt/sources.list file (you have to edit that one as superuser "root", e.g. sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list .... ) Then tell Synaptic to do a refresh (or type this into a terminal: sudo apt-get update ) and from there on it should be available.