On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Jackie LaVaque wrote: > Can someone tell me what to do to get this thing installed? Basically I need > to know what to type after I put the CD in the drive... from what I > understand, "tar" is sort of like a "zip" deal, where the program needs to > be "untarred" (unzipped) to install... but I don't know how to "untar" > anything. I'm a real green newbie to Linux... can anyone help? tar is the tape archiver, what is does is put the selected files in a tar file(.tar) or remove them from a tar file tar can be used in conjunction with compression programs like compress, bzip2 and most commonly gzip to untar a file you usually have to uncompress it first, but most implementations (including GNU tar) have special flags that do it for you on the fly first you have to find out how it was compressed if it was compressed using gzip the file will usually have the extention .tar.gz and sometimes .tgz to uncompress this file to the current dir type tar -xzvf /path/to/filename.tar.gz if it was done using bzip2 the extension will be .tar.bz2 and the command to extract it is tar --bzip2 -xvf /path/to/filename.tar.bz2 if in the unlikely event it was compressed using compress use uncompress first on the file then tar -zvf <filename.tar> keep in mind that unlike zip tar files usually create a directory to put the files in so you do not need to untar/compress in a seperate directory as for the installation... you are best of reading the INSTALL and the README files in the newly created directory as build instructions can vary widely -munir