Untar, Unzip, Compile, and Install

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Let's assume we just downloaded the file sylpheed-0.8.5.tar.gz from the Internet and copied it to /usr/local/src/sylpheed-0.8.5.tar.gz. Here's what we'll do (after navigating to the download dir with cd /usr/local/src):

1. tar xvzf sylpheed-0.8.5.tar.gz
---> this untars, unzips and creates a directory sylpheed-0.8.5 with all the files contained in the archive. This is what the options mean:

	x	extract from archive
	v	verbose
	z	archive is compressed
	f	filename follows

2. cd sylpheed-0.8.5

3. ./configure
---> Now we create the "makefile" which we need in order to compile the applications correctly. If this is successful (probably not – just kidding!) you type

4. make
---> And the source code will be compiled to a executables. This will take the longest, depending on your CPU I guess. If this finishes without any error messages you can consider yourself a lucky folk and you quickly type

5. make install
---> Which will actually install (=copy the binaries) the application. Get yourself a treat.

You might come across files with the extension .bz2. These files are compressed with a different (and better) compression algorithm and will have to be treated a little differently. Instead of extracting them with one single step we will have perform two steps:

1a. bunzip sylpheed-0.8.5.tar.bz2
This decompresses the file and creates the file sylpheed-0.8.5.tar

1b. tar xvf sylpheed-0.8.5.tar
As you can see we are omitting the "z" option this time since the archive has already been decompressed.

TAR? GZ? WHAT'S UP WITH THAT – WHY NOT SIMPLY ZIP? GZIP DOES NOT COMBINE MULTIPLE FILES INTO AN ARCHIVE – IT CAN COMPRESS ONE FILE AT A TIME. TAR, ON THE OTHER HAND, CAN COMBINE FILES WITHOUT COMPRESSING THEM. SO WHAT WE DO IS SIMPLY TAR THE REQUESTED FILES INTO A .TAR ARCHIVE AND THEN ZIP THE ENTIRE ARCHIVE WITH GZIP. THE LINUX VERSION OF TAR ALREADY DOES BOTH THINGS IN ONE STEP (THE –z ARGUMENT), MOST UNIX OPERATING SYSTEMS HOWEVER DON'T.