n00b needs help with unziping/installations.
 

I'm using Mandriva 2007 Free and am quite the Linux n00b. I have several games that I would like to play, but I'm not quite sure what I need to do to do this. Several are .tar.tar files, some are .tar.gz files, and still others are .sh files. What are these strange designations? What do they mean? I used to be an XP script kiddy, but then Microsoft went all 'corporate' on me, so Linux extensions are new to me. Any help would be appreciated, and any information that I need to give will be done so gladly.


Comrade C.E.R.T. out-

Well, .tar.tar doesn't really make much sense. That would be ineffective, are you sure that is what it is?

.tar.gz is a compressed tar archive. 90% of the time this is going to contain an application in source code form, which means you need to compile it once you have extracted it. To open such a file you would do something like:

Note that the .gz extension is removed after the first command.

Now, the .sh files are executable installers. For those you would first make them executable, and then run them. Like so:

Then it would likely start an interactive installer of some sort, depending on what it actually does.

Like MS3FGX has already stated, tar is a "tarball" that "glues" files together. .gz and .bz2 are extensions dealing with compression. In typical Linux fashion, you have choice...you can simply tar a bunch of files together (so they're treated as one file), or you can tar them and then compress them (like WinZip/7zip, etc...).

.sh is a shell script. It's a text file that contains shell commands to accomplish some goal (think batch files in Windows). It could be an installer, or it could be a launcher that sets environment variables (or checks system "sanity", etc...) prior to launching the actual executable.

with source code in a .tar.gz file the normal way is

$tar xvfz filename.tar.gz (this does the unziping and untaring in one line with the z swich, use j for .tar.bz2)

$./configure
$ make
# make install

Thanks for the help, I'll try those. I assume I run them in a terminal, right? As for the .tar.tar, that's what it says. Both the Sauerbraten and the BOS Wars files I downloaded from their respective sites were saved as '.tar.tar' files. I could see why this would be odd, but I'm too lazy to look into it further. Thank you all for your help, when I have another question I'll send it your way. :D

Comrade C.E.R.T. out-

useful help on mandriva installing
 

I found these pages very helpful when starting out on Mandriva

http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

This will help you find and install things easily from command line. Makes things very easy to uninstall as well. Check out urpmi commands.

and

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Mandriva

this site has some useful stuff. Goodluck