I really learned to appreciate window's setup procedures after I had to do the same thing on Linux. It could be so easy, just run setup.exe, hit next a few times and we are done (aah, maybe a reboot first). We are spoiled children, coming from Windows. But what if you don't have a setup.exe? Well, Linux usually does not have a setup.exe, sorry (some applications do however, including Mozilla). But nevertheless, believe it or not, installing software on Linux can be easy – even easier than on Windows! That is the case if you have an rpm file – a RedHat package manager file. But more on that later.
So what if the latest apache, wu-ftp or mysql does not come as an .rpm file but instead as a .tar.gz file? Don't worry - there is a solution.
You will simply have to decompress, compile and install the software. This is actually where a lot of people are having problems – usually due to misconfigured systems, missing libraries and such. Okay, so we have two options:
a) Untar, unzip, compile and install
or
b) Use a package manager (RedHat uses RPM, other distributions (like Debian) use different package formats with similar functionality though)