What to do with tar balls?

[j paul]

I was looking for some software to learn AI programing, I found it here

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/proje ... oplog.html

after much trouble I managed to download it as a tar ball.
I unzipped this .gz archive but could not see an .exe!

1) why are .gz files called tar balls?
2)if there is no exe what do I need to do to get it working?

[Orbmiser]

Does the site give instructions? Or is there a readme in the tarball?
Should be something on setting up.

Right at the top of the site.

There are now much simpler to use downloadable scripts for installing Linux Poplog
on 32 bit Ubuntu (and other Debian versions of linux):

The download and installation scripts (which re-link poplog) should work on 64-bit linux, provided that you have installed the packages required for compiling and running 32-bit applications (e.g. libc6-dev-i386 in Ubuntu?), and have the required 32-bit X window libraries, especially libX11, libXt, libXext and if possibe lesstif.
Install the 'development' versions of libraries, as they are required for re-linking to work.

.

[xenopeek]

That's the most obfuscated website I've ever seen I can't even find a link to a .gz file! It seem from this part you are to download a script, make that executable and run it, which will download and install the program for you.

To answer your questions;
1) .gz files are called tarballs, because the tar program is used to create the archive of the files, which is then compressed with gzip (hence .gz). Wikipedia has a bit about it also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_%28fil ... _tar_files
2) Linux does not have "exe" files. Any file can be an executable program, the file extension is completely irrelevant. Whether a file is executable or not is determined by its filesystem permissions. Another reference to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem ... ermissions

[bjornmu]

Eh, .gz files are not tarballs, they are just compressed files. .tar.gz files are tarballs, so called because it's a compressed 'tar'. I should know, I help manage a system that produces hundreds if not thousands of them daily. Sometimes the file suffix is .tgz instead of .tar.gz .

Ton unpack a tarball, run this command in a terminal window:

Code: Select all

tar zxpf <name of .tar.gz file>

It will unpack the tarball within your current directory. Typically you'll get a directory with the same name (without .tar.gz) with further files and directories in it.

[j paul]

I thank you for the help [no joy]
obfuscated! the gz file was at the bottom of the 7th page of instructions??? though I think I was going round and a round, and that at least once I liked back to the same spot on the same page.

The install instuctions in the read me file say that it should be in /usr/local/poplog/v15.62 before I run the script. Unfortunatly I apparently do not have the authorithy to create poplog/v15.62 in /usr/local/, on my computer.

Yes there is a download / install script at the top of the page. I cut and pasted it into a teminal window, pressed enter and......
it said that it would install the program......
but then did nothing!
If it had frozen or crashed that would have been something, but no.... nothing!

Am I being hyper critical. or is it the case that whenever go looking for interesting thing for my pc to do [beond the predigested stuff in sofwear manager] , wiil I allways come across sites that assume that I am a natural born linux speaker.

2 week of linux has took a lot of thr shine of it. But I will stick with it, because of the posibilities oferd by terminal scripts.

[xenopeek]

No, it's very common to find a .deb package you can install automatically, or to have an archive you can extract anywhere and run from there, or for it to be source code which you can compile and run in the standard way (though see the readme! and recommend you replace the last step with sudo checkinstall, see here viewtopic.php?f=90&t=97158):

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./configure
make
sudo make install

Or for it to have a decent installer (most games from Humble Bundle for example install through a nice installer).

You are unfortunate to want to install software, for which even the website itself doesn't seem to want to give you the information on how to do that