Really confused, need some Red Hat 8.0 help

Hey there,

I got Red Hat up and running well on my laptop but I am having trouble figureing out how the heck to install programs with the OS. I'm not talking about just RPM's. I mean everything from tar.gz to other file types. Is there some program out there that can do for me what WinZip does on my windows machine? because this is getting very frustrating and the fact that I'm new doesn't help heh heh. Even when I click the file that I wnt to install and then hit 'run' or 'run in terminal' it does absolutely nothing... and here I am at my computer asking.... why? :(

All I want to figuer out is how I can install and get things up and running on my system so I can run things like NMAP or Nessus and things like that.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

-- Peace :cool:

you need to become familiar with gzip -- (GNU Zip) at www.gzip.org

at the command line you should be able to type "man gzip"

try at the command line 'tar -xvzf whatever.tar.gz"

fyrewall gave you the easy answer I will try to explain a little more.

When you are on a Linux and Unix system, they use .tar.gz Which is 2 zips. One which is Gzip and one which is tar, which is closely related to winzip.

To install software, go to whatever directory it is in, and do gzip -d FILE

then tar -xof FILE

then do MAKE Makefile.c (Usuaully that, I am more used to doing perl, which is little different.)

Here I have to run and don't have time to explain everything.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Building-HOWTO.html

Let me know if you need further help.

Just to add my $.02 ...

Once you've untarred the file, there is typically a README file and/or an INSTALL file which will give instructions on how to compile it. Usually the commands are going to be
./configure
make
make install

Also, sometimes the download files are compressed with bzip2 instead of gzip.

for gzip the command to decompress & untar is... tar -zxvf TheFileIDownloded.tar.gz
for a bzip2 file, replace the z with a j... tar -jxvf TheFileIDownloaded.tar.bz2

Nice tutorial on how to install from source here . Thanks JinX :D It's helped me!

Wow, thanks everyone. With all the info I was able to figure out how to do it thanks!

However, I seem to be cursed at the moment...

I am using VMWare on this laptop, I finished installing the VMWare tools package thanks to you guys...
Afterwards I decided to check out the program 'gaim'... couldn't get to the internet? Check my browser... can't connect. So I switch back to windows, check that browser... works. So I figure 'ok must be a Linux problem then, god only knows why tho...' So just for kicks I rebooted the OS to see if that does something. Seemingly that made the problem worse because now I can't even use my touchpad mouse on that OS, but I can when I switch to windows?! What the heck!

I feel like the 'vmware-tools' package I installed might have something to do with it. That's the only thing I can think of. Perhaps there is a better diagnosis. I don't know how to uninstall the package because I can't use the mouse and I boot to the GUI from default?

Am I screwed here?

I feel so discouraged... I've spent such a long time trying to figure out and learn stuff, and as soon as one thing gets figured out two more even more serious problems pop up. I feel like I wasn't ment for this sometimes :(

Any help is... as always... greatly appreciated...