Help Installing Programs
 

OK, so someone told me how to install programs with add/remove programs, and also using synaptic package manager, but I downloaded a .zip for a program called Phun found here and I'm not sure how to get add/remove programs and/or synaptic package manager to see it and install it for me.

OS: Ubuntu (Gnome)

Are you using 32 bit or 64 bit? If you downloaded the ZIP, then I assume 64bit.

You need yo unzip the file, like so

And then simply run

You don't use the package manager or synaptic. First you extract the zip, you should get a folder called Phun. To run the program, open a terminal, cd into the Phun folder, then type: ./phun.

so then what is the full extent of what I type into the terminal?

What does it mean to CD into the folder?

Okay, to recap completely for you.

First, open up a shell (should be in the Applications tab at the top of your screen if you're in GNOME).

Change to the directory where the .zip file is located, more than likely your Desktop. The file for your desktop is located in ~/Desktop, where ~ is your /home/(username) directory.

So:

then unzip the file

then change into the file that was created

then run the Phun executable as such

Hopefully that is step by step enough for you.

Happy Hunting :-)

You can extract stuff by simply right-clicking on it and selecting "extract".

To run the program, just cd into the phun folder. By default, your terminal points to your home directory. So if you type
ls
into your terminal, that command (which is used to list the content of a directory) will list the contents of your home directory.
Now if something is located elsewhere, say in a subfolder, you need to cd into the folder first:
cd folder_name (for example, cd phun)
Then you can run the program by typing
./phun

Or you can do both at once like this:
phun/phun
(this assumes that the phun folder actually spells "phun" rather than Phun or PHUN).

If you get fed up with running the command from the terminal, just create a shortcut to your desktop. Right-click on your desktop, select "create launcher" and type in a name (phun, I would guess) and the command you would use to launch it manually:
/home/username/phun/phun
You can also add an icon if you have one.

ok thanks guys that looked like it was going to work, only when I did ./phun it said permission denied. How do I authorize it?

I went and right clicked on the folder and gave authorization to myself and anyone else to do anything to the file and all sub-folders, but it still says permission denied.

permission denied? Then you need to use su or sudo. If you are using Ubuntu, just run
sudo ./phun
and submit your password.
On other systems, type
su -
submit your root password and then
./phun
By the way, did you save the folder to your home directory? You normally wouldn't be denied permission for stuff that is in your home (although there are exceptions).

I type in su and press enter, then is says "password:" so I try to type in my password, but when I do no text appears, I press enter anyways, a blank line then appears (I tried typing in my password here too) and after a second the blank like is filled the the notice that sorry, authentication failed.

There won't be anything showing when you type the password, so that's normal. Are you using the root (administration) password or your user's password. Be sure to use the root one.

However I think the problem is with the permision settings, not needing to run it as root. I've seen a decent number of files that aren't executable when you extract them so you need to change the permissions if that's the case.

You can check the permissions by typing ls -l phun when you're in the directory. It should have something like rwxr-x--x (I just made up that combination). The first three letters refer to the owners permission, in my example it has read,write and execute permissions. The next three are the group permissions, in the example that is just read and execute. The last three are for everyone else, the example gives these just executable permissions. Another part of the output should also list the owner of the file which should be your user.

To add executable permissions if it's missing you need to type chmod +x phun.

OK, just for phun I downloaded it. The executable lacks executable bit. chmod u+x phun

"chmod u+x phun" typed that in, then ./phun again, now it says

"bash: ./phun: cannot execute binary file"

Do you run a 64-bit OS. What is the output of ls -l in the phun directory.

ls -l shows this:

6097495 autoexec.cfg
6097545 libboost_filesystem.so
6097550 Phun.ico
6097496 BUGS.txt
6097546 libGLEW.so.1.5
6097551 README.txt
6097497 Data
6097547 Linux64note.txt
6127709 Scenes
6097544 Help_swe.txt
6097548 phun
6127722 Screenshots
6097543 Help.txt
6097549 Phun.bmp
6097552 TODO.txt

(Some stuff was highlighted too)

I run a 32 bit OS as far as I know.

You have the wrong one, this is for a 64bit system. Remove the phun folder and the zip file, return to the site and download the 32bit version, then follow the instructions already posted to extract, change the permissions and run the program.