Gah! Tarballs!

[ketzerei]

Well, now that I have your attention...
I'm fairly new to linux now, and I'm trying to understand how to unpack tarballs and rpms. Every time I try, I fail misrebly. I''m afraid someone is going to have to spell it out for me, step by step. I am currently running Backtrack V2 and some help would be very much appreciated.

[Juan Pablo]

Upacking a tarball is just a matter of

tar zxvf <tarball-name>.tar.gz or
tar jxvf <tarball-name>.tar.bz2

But I don't know why you want to unpack rpms ... any particular reason?
rpms are packaged binaries and are installed like this
rpm -ivh <program-name>.rpm

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Here's a HowTo that should get you going:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...are-linux.html

oops... Juan was faster on the submit button.

[ketzerei]

I've read the How-To's on the fourms here and, well, still don't get it. I don't know if I'm really that just thick headed, but, I still can't seem to do it right. I can't unpack anything from the tarballs correctly. I always get an error and nothing seems to work. I couldn't tell you exactly what the error is because it's not always the same.

!!!!Wait!!!!
Never mind. The message that keeps comming ups is something do with failded dependencies. It has something to do with bash and lib. Any Ideas?

[Juan Pablo]

Don't install tarballs unless you know what you are doing exactly, always use RPMS, it's much easier, or even better use a package manager that support dependency checking like YUM, APT or YaST

[bryansmith]

What distro are you using and what are you trying to install?

Take Juan Pablo's advice and use a package manager. If you supply your distro and program you're trying to install, I'll tell you how.

[ketzerei]

What distro are you using and what are you trying to install?

Take Juan Pablo's advice and use a package manager. If you supply your distro and program you're trying to install, I'll tell you how.

I am using Backtrack 2 and trying to install armagetron advanced and open arena. Open arena is tarball and armagetron is rpm. I keep getting the dependencies message for the rpm, not the tarball. The tarball just never works, there's no error. I think my syntax is just incorrect.

[bryansmith]

Well, according to Distrowatch, Backtrck uses TGZ's as its native package format. Therefore, try to stick with those as oppose to RPM's.

For Armagetron, I have two sugeestions: either use the bin package (it's an autopackage so it will install the deps for you) or try to compile from source. As for Open Arena, how are you trying to build/install it?

As a side question, why are you using a security focused Linux distro and then trying to install games on it? Would you not be better off with a distro aimed at the desktop?

[ketzerei]

For Armagetron, I have two sugeestions: either use the bin package (it's an autopackage so it will install the deps for you) or try to compile from source. As for Open Arena, how are you trying to build/install it?

I just downloaded an OA tarball from their site.

As a side question, why are you using a security focused Linux distro and then trying to install games on it? Would you not be better off with a distro aimed at the desktop?

The reason i'm using backtrack is because the computer i'm using can't really run any other distro well because it's so old, and because I wanted to use my older comp for something usefull.

[Juan Pablo]

Have you tried DSL? It's aimed for the desktop and includes APT