are there any tutorials that are pretty friendly as far as extracting files i download?

TIA

did you point the manager at the file
or
drag and drop the file (still in tar.gz form) to the theme manager window??

Alternative friendly tutorial :

tar means the files should have been bound up in tar form and gz means it should have been compressed with gzip. So

tar -xzvf foo.tar.gz

means 'use the tar tool to eXtract and unZip the File foo.tar.gz Verbosely (i.e., list what it's doing)'. You can leave off the 'v'.

You might do this in ~/src or wherever you want to keep your stuff. Then, ideally,
./configure
make
su
make install (or 'checkinstall' if you've got it and it's definitely worth getting).

That's really all there is to it, if everything goes smoothly and it's posted around here hundreds of time. A search will probably turn up a zillion threads and I think there's a sticky somewhere.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Tarball will get extracted to your current working directory - you can check it with pwd - (just in case you're wondering where the extracted directory is) - another thing - you should always read the read-me and install files for further instructions on installing - often the tarball just contains source, but sometimes its a pre-compiled binary, so check the read-me file etc.

and sometimes you need to have flags when you issue ./configure , and it can tell you what depencies it has.