Tar procedure
 

I've been through tar man and info pages to try to figure out how to install some music (drum machine) software and i found out some really interesting stuff but it's so big that i got lost not knowing what i really wanted . I would like to know some things please :

1- How can one know when to use the tar command?
2- There are different types of tar archives . Can someone name them please ?
3- At the man pages there are some hints on how to correctly start preparing the files into an archive so that tar can work with it . I have created a directory where i put the software i downloaded , can i go from here and CD to the archive and actually insert the tar command ?( tar -xvf music software .tar or whatever it is)? ( i think i tripped on this one , but what the hell )
4- I have downloaded a etheme also and it is a gzip file (aphex-enlightenment.etheme). Does it belong to a specific enlightenment archive on Slackware ? Is this one of the dangers of having other files with same name being deleted without warning ?
5- what does "from the source mean"?


Thanks a lot for any kind of help

ZION (zi' .an) n. hill in Jerusalem ; town of Jerusalem ; the Jewish people ; Church of God ; heaven . -ISM n. movement among Jews to further the Jewish National state in Palestine . -IST n. advocate of Zionism (Heb. tsyon, a hill) .

1. To know when to use tar command - if you have tar archive ( a file with .tar extansion) to untar it use
tar xvf file.tar
- if you wnat to create a tar archive. Use
tar cvf tarfile.tar file1 file2 ....

2. There is also a gzipped tar archive with .tar.gz and .tgz extansions
to untar them use
tar xvfz file.tar.gz
tar xvfz file.tgz

and similar to the previous to create the gzippped tar archive use
tar cvfz file.tar.gz file1 file2 ...

3. I can't read this question, please clarify.
4. For .gzip files use gunzip ( read man pages for different options) to decompress the archive
5. From the source means what it says, usually GPL sighned software is distributed with source available to the user, that means that the archive you downloaded contains actual code for the software, which you have to compile and install.

thanks for the tips Neo 77777 . I will try to learn more about that "compiling from the source" thing . For me beyond this point there are dragons .