Tarball and Madprobe loop
 

Hi
what is Tarball? Do we have to install tarball to get the xen working. I mean to install guest OSes over XEN, do i have to install Tarball...?

and what is 'modprobe loop'? Is it some command, if it is then for what purpose is it used.

I googled a lot but couldnt find correct answer....

thanks

A tarball is collection of files that have been gathered into a single file or 'tarball'. The have the format file.tar. Often they are compressed after being gathered into a tarball so they might have the format file.tar.gz or file.tar.bz2.

If you download a software program for example you will often get a compressed tarball of the form program.tar.gz. You would run the command tar -zvf program.tar.gz which will unzip and extract the contents of the tarball, leaving you with a directory called 'program'

Look at man tar

But why do we use it.
I installed FC6 with XEN . Do i still have to install tarball..
i am trying to install guest OS but soon after setup cpmpletes , the vm get disapear and if i try to switch it on using command line, i get error Device 5632(vbd) could not be connected. Hotg plug scripts not working....
Is there anything to do with tarball for it...?
thanks

To package files together?

Don't exactly understand what you're asking. It's probably a good idea to install the tar program, so you can make/extract from archives if and when you need to. If there are applications you download in tarball format, then you'll need to unpack those tarballs to use them (or to be able to build the application from its source code).

As for "modprobe loop", it loads a module called loop into the kernel? Not sure what this module would be for, though.

thanx i got your point....Any idea about my error as i mentioned above?

Well, that's definetly a newbie question ;) and pretty fundamental ;( In short, "tarbal" is a "tar" archive, most often, compressed with gzip or bzip2 - files with extension ".tar.gz"/".tgz", "tar.bz2" respectivelly. Most of the source code is distributed in such archives. In the Linux world the tarbals are used as extensively as ZIPs in Windows. To install it means to unpack it, compile the source, and place the resulting binaries where they must be. You had probably seen something like this:

$ tar -jxf something.tar.bz2
$ cd something
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Most Linux distros provide a bunch of already compiled software, usually in ".rpm" (RH based distros) or ".deb" (Debian based) packages, which contain the program files and scripts to place them where they are expected to be. But if there is no precompiled package for the program in question, you must compile it yourself.
As for "Googled a lot ..." - you realy had to gues, that "modprobe" is the command, "loop" is the argument, and to google for "modprobe" only, yet the first results are precizely on the question. BTW, You can get the same info from "man modprobe" in the console window. "man", from "manual", is the standard UNIX help system, you ca get help for "man" itself with "man man". In short, "modprobe" is used for inserting and removing kernel modules. And it's a bit beyond the "newbie" scope.
At the end, i can suggest You to get some good book for beginners, you may look at "tldp.org".