Installing Programs on Linux

We continue the topic of installing software in Linux. As you already understand, the use of YAST and RPM-packages is not a complete list of ways to install programs. The method described below is also often encountered. So, installing programs from the tarball.

First, let's define what a tarball is. In fact, this is a regular archive created by the tar program distributed in unix environments. The name of the archive usually looks like name.tar.gz or name.tar.bz2 (where name is the archive's own name), which depends on the compression method.

Let's start the installation, which we will do with the example of Skype.

First you need to get the tarball itself. It can be downloaded from the official Skype website. Go to the program download page

And choose the type of operating system we need (in our case - Linux).

Click "Download" and in the menu that appears

Fig. 1

Choose Static. After that, the standard window for downloading the file appears

Fig. 2

Select "Save file" and click "OK".

Here, in fact, the installation of the program begins. Open any program to work with the command line in Linux (I use konsole) and go to the folder with the loaded tarball (by default in openSUSE12.1 ~ / Download).

Fig. 3

Team

# Mkdir skype

We create a new directory (to extract the tarball content there). Then go to this directory

#cd skype

And unpack the tarball itself. At the same time, we note that our tarball has the extension .tar.bz2

#tar -xjvf ../skype_static-2.2.0.35.tar.bz2

(../ is used because the tarball lies on the directory above). Here we will make a small digression: if the tarball had an extension of .tar.gz, then it would be necessary to use -xzf keys to unpack it. So, the process of unpacking tarball began and we need to wait for its completion.

Now in our newly created directory we got one more - skype_static-2.2.0.35, go to it

#cd skype_static-2.2.0.35

Use the ls command to look at the contents of the directory

Move the desktop icon to the desktop (if there is a desire of course).

#mv skype.desktop ~ / Desktop

We move to one directory up and move the entire program directory to the directory intended for this (in the case of linux - / usr, although the directory can be selected and the other, it all depends only on you)

More we do not need to work with the command line and you can close it with a command

#exit

Now let's pay attention to the icon transferred to the desktop. Right-click it

Fig. 4

And select "Propeties".

Fig. 5

On the "Permission" tab, tick the "Is executable"

Fig. 6th

Continuation   ...

The full version is available at http://freeproger.ru/index.php/programmy/92-ustanovka-programm-v-linux-tarboly