Hello,
Tried to follow the info: ( apparantly, I can't post a URL because I haven't posted enough yet to ID that I am not a spammer) but it was an article on the linuxquestions website about how to compile programs from source. It would be much easier to follow my rambling if one could follow the article I was reading : linuxquestions.org/questions/answers.php?action=viewarticle&artid=15
but I was not even close to success. First, I'm running Mandrake 10.2. Ok, I couldn't even download the program to the directory: /usr/local/src as the owner and group is root. So I ended the session and logged in as root, changed that src folder in properties, permissions so the owner was myself and the group was users with all the boxes checked under owner, group and others except for write in others. (clearly you can see that I do not know what I am doing...). Anyway, logged back on as myself again and was able to then download the program (firefox 1.0.7 installer.tar.gz) into the folder. Well, next I tried to type the code (which I assume that I do in the "run command" under menu. Nothing happened, so I tried it in the "Konsole" program and got this :

[frank@localhost ~]$ tar zxf firefox-1.0.7.installer.tar.gz
tar: firefox-1.0.7.installer.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Please try not to laugh...I'm clueless. But I want to learn. !st, did I screw up something in the scr folder by changing the permission owner/group thing? Please help...I thought that would be an easy thing to start with installing before I tackled installing a program to change my synaptics mousepad settings so the tapping would stop which is driving me crazy. Maybe I shouldn't do this so late at night. Should I back up and read something much more basic about using Linux before trying this level? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Several things...

The file you DOWNLOADED isn't a source-tarball, it's a
binary installer in a tar archive, so the how-to you're
trying to follow is inappropriate ...

And you obviously downloaded it to some other location
than your home ... it's probably on your desktop?


Cheers,
Tink

Hello,

First you must be root to install anything:

$su
Password: ********
#
Then first gunzip the file:

#gunzip firefox-1.0.7.installer.tar.gz

What remains is the tarball to extract:

#tar -xvf firefox-1.0.7.installer.tar

The result is a new directory that contains your firefox installer data:

#cd firefox-installer/
#ls -al
total 1316
drw-r--r-- 3 root root 4096 Sep 21 01:46 ./
drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 4096 Oct 29 14:26 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41433 Sep 21 01:46 config.ini
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1699 Sep 21 01:46 firefox-installer*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1192940 Sep 21 01:46 firefox-installer-bin*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8976 Sep 21 01:46 header.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3289 Sep 21 01:46 install.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6423 Sep 21 01:46 license.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 55809 Sep 21 01:46 watermark.png
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 21 01:46 xpi/

The next step:

#./firefox-installer

If you do this right a new gui appears to install firefox.

Good luck,

Sjonnie

Thank you both!