how do i instal a tar.gz?

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scorp123
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Post by scorp123 »

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.

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cd /path/to/where/stuff/got/unpacked
./installer-script-name.sh
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 :lol:
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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scorp123
Level 8
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Posts: 2272
Joined: Sat Dec 02, 2006 4:19 pm
Location: Switzerland

Post by scorp123 »

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 .... )

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#AUTOMATIX REPOS START
deb http://www.getautomatix.com/apt feisty main
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-updates main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse
#AUTOMATIX REPOS END
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.
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