Hi, this is my first post ever in regards to linux so please have patience with me. I recently got the notion to try linux after seeing a episode of tech tv. I have spent the last week getting windows xp and Mandrake 9.2 to coexist on the same drive and i have finnally succeded in that area. It would have been a lot easier if compaq had just given me an xp disk and not one of those system restore disks that reformatts the hard drive automatically every time i want to install it. If anyone knows how to extract windows xp from a compaq system restore disk i would appreciate the info. I have gotten everything configured and things seem to work ok but i have run into trouble trying to get macromedia flash player installed to my web browser. I can follow the instructions from the readme of the player alright but i dont know how to uncompress a tar gz file. I have tried to use ark and the file roller but the instructions tell me that i have to install it from a terminal. I can get to the terminal ok and know how to navigate in it but i dont know the commands to get the file uncompressed. once i do ill be ok.

On a side note, i have heard a lot of people saying that linux is hard to learn and use for the beginner. I can agree with that. Over the past week i knew nothing about formatting a hard drive, burning iso's, and installing linux but now i can do it in my sleep. On the other hand the more i play around and experiment in linux the more i like it. Now i see why people say that it is stable and mostly reliable. Personally i think people may be afraid of the learning curve that happens with the switch from windows. Dont fear the reaper!

Thank you for your time in reading my post.

This website was instrumental in my success in getting Mandrake 9.2 up and running with Windows XP Keep up the good work!

First up, welcome to LinuxQuestions.org Secondly, the usual command to extract files from a tar.gz is Do this from a console and it will extract the tarball to the current directory. I hope this helps a bit

Baldrick

You can read the instructions that come with the software you are wanting to use. For instance many web sites will have some sort of FAQ or release notes. Download to a directory such as /user/downloads or something. start another session as root. Then you generally (in the console) tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz paying attention to case. Then, cd to the directory you need to compile the program in then ./configure then make then make install then exit. Then you can run the program from the command line in the usr session.

Thanks for the help bluesman2333 and baldrick 65! I got it done and it works like a champ.

When using the tar command given above, make sure that the -f option is the last one on the list before the file name. One thing different about the tar command is that the dash before the options is optional.

There are two commands that you will probably use in the future where the command letter does not use a dash but the options do. These are the rar and par commands.
for rar:
rar x -kb filename.rar will extract the files preserving subdirectories. The -kb option will keep broken (partial) files. Adding a dash before the x will not work.

I usually encourage *not* using the hyphen at all since that allows for using the flags in any order, like tar xfvz file.tar.gz or tar zxfv file.tar.gz. That makes it less of a hazzle to remember the different ways to use the command.

Håkan