metta2012 wrote: Well if you just delete the folder, are you really deleting the entire program, it's structure, and everything?
Usually not. But as I see it you haven't installed anything, you just unpacked an archive which created a folder. So it will be sufficient if we just get rid of that one.
metta2012 wrote: tar xvjf qnextsetup.tar
That's the command to unpack a *.bz2 archive ("j" switch up there ..... for *.gz archives you'd use the "z" switch). But that doesn't yet install anything. It just unpacks an archive.
metta2012 wrote: Okay.. what's the difference between "tar" ing an application and "make"ing an application
"tar" stands for "Tape Archiver", it's an old UNIX command that archives and unarchives files. By itself it is not able to compress stuff, so that's why you'd use it in conjunction with compressors such as "compress" (giving *.tar.Z files), "gzip" (*.tar.gz), "bzip2" (*.tar.bz2) and even "zip" (*.tar.zip ... pretty rare though).
"make" is a compiler command. It requires a so called 'Makefile' which instructs the C-compiler where to find the source code and how to compile your stuff. For such a 'Makefile' to be created you'd first need to run the "./configure" command. So step by step this would be:
I don't recommend this stuff to newbies. It's much safer to you to stick to the things that 'apt' and 'Synaptic' offer you.
metta2012 wrote: What files do you look for in the .tar.gz or tar.bz2 folder that tells you that you have to use tar or you can just unzip it and use make?
Again, this highly depends on what you downloaded and how this stuff is supposed to be installed. There is no general rule. Safest thing would be to read the instructions on the web page where you downloaded this stuff from. Or check if there is a 'README' file somewhere somehow.