This is a short tutorial on how you can install softwares from packages of tar.gz or tar.bz2 extension.

Basically 5 steps

1) Uncompress  and Extract Packages

for ‘tar.gz’   — >

yo@home:~$ tar -zxvf package_name.tar.gz

for ‘tar.bz2’ —– >

yo@home:~$ tar -jxvf package_name.tar.bz2

2) Change to the extracted directory

yo@home:~$ cd package_name

yo@home:~/package_name$

3) Configuring

yo@home:~/package_name$ ./configure

This creates a MakeFile which is the needed for the next step, which is building.( Make sure that no errors are reported while configuring so as to move to the next step.)

4) Building

yo@home:~/package_name$ make

5) Installing

You need to be the root user to install the software.

yo@home:~/package_name$ su –

Password:

root@home:~/package_name# make install

The above command will install the desired software to the default location if everything goes fine. 🙂

To uninstall

As root execute the following command

root@home:~/package_name# make uninstall