help with installation extreme basics
 

ok i'm not sure if i can articulate this one but here goes...i'm an administrator who has a specialty in windows...linux has proceeded to kick my *ss. anywho, this is the piece:

once i've downloaded the install tar.gz how do i know where it has landed and can be located to unzip?

First, How did you download it?
Second, try using find or locate

locate may not work if the file is brand new. It searches a database for the name of you file.
The database is usually updated at night, or you can update it manually by running updatedb

learn to love locate(it's much faster than find)

hm
 

i'm attempting to test install rsynch on a vmware setup...so i downloaded the prog. from ie on windows then booted into linux using vmware.

is there any possibility you can advise me of a better way of going about this...

...and as far as the locate command goes..would that be something like:

locate what_ever_the_name_is.tar.gz ??

I would suggest hanging around in Linux a little bit to get familar with the commands and the much different way of doing things.

Yes, locate will locate whatever you type in.

locate .tar.gz will give you a list of all .tar.gz files it has in the database.

Another suggestion, if you aren't familiar with it, is to check out the manual pages. Every command has a manual page that will describe exactly how to use the command. You might want to try a few of the following:

man man
man locate
man find
man tar

Essentially, you type 'man' and the command to get the pages...

Good luck with your Linux endeavor!

BTW, dosnlinux is right, locate is much easier and quicker than the find command.

thanks dns
 

i do appreciate your advice.

let me ask this...
 

how does linux and windows articulate with each other on the same system. if i do a "locate" for a file ...and my file sits on the windows partition...will linux be able to see a tar.gz on it?

I'm not sure about the virtual Linux(I think this is what vmware is), but if it were a normal Linux box you could access your windows partition by mounting it.

The commands would look something like this...

is mounting the partition the same as...
 

is mounting the partition the same as creating a shared folder in windows or does mounting the windows partition give one full access to the entire windows directory?

Re: is mounting the partition the same as...
 

No, it is not the same as a share folder. One has to set permissions for that so that other user can also write to it.
Mounting the windows partition gives full command of that partition.
Mount your windows partition and then give the loacate or find command to look for the file. Since you have downloaded your file in Windows env your file could be in that partion, I guess.

-Prasanta

thanks you guys..
 

man, i can't tell you how much i've learned from you guys, thanks for being so open to helping me out. you guys rock...although, i can tell i've got a long way to go i guess it always starts at the bottom eh? heheh


thanks again and again

you cant mount windows partition in Vmware like it in real machine...

becase Vmware use a virtual harddisk image/a free partition on your disk, but it will not detect other parition like it is a real machine...

consult the help file in Vmware topic like "how to share folder between the host machine and the vmware"

regards

ya...
 

that make sense.

mounting a windows partition is like assigning a drive letter to a drive in windows. instead off accessing a partion by going to My Computer and clicking on the spacific drive you just change to the mount point directory after mounting.

When I first started using Linux I found this concept very strange, but I've learned to like it more:)

To decompress a tar.gz (aka tap archive gzip) file, type `tar -xzf tar.gz_file_name` or ``tar -xvzf tar.gz_file_name`. This will decompress the file in the same directory.

To use the find utility to search for a file that you do not know if has either upper or lower case letters, use `find / -iname '*.tar.gz' 2>/dev/null`.

Windows uses world userspace names for drives that points from partition of the hard drive or removable medium, so it is a drive, directory, and file OS. Linux structure in a file and directory tree. There are no drives. The raw storage devices gets mounted on a desire directory. The user will just see directories and files but will not see any drives. If you use the command df or mount -v, you will see what partition is mounted on a certain directory. Also users will not know if he or she is on a different filesystem although FAT and NTFS will have the same permission for every file and directory.

When I moved over to Linux, it was not hard for me because I used DOS for several years. Today's Windows users need to use DOS before using Linux because it does make it easier to know command line concepts.

ok i've attempted to decompress the tar.gz
 

this is the piece...

i've got rsync-2.6.4.tar.gz on cd ...and i've mounted the cdrom file system with mount /mnt/cdrom -w

then i attempt to decompress ...i've tried the zcat command and it appears to do something...but i do a locate and have no luck.

how do i tell it to decompress into a specific directory so that i can make install ??

this is driving me bananas...

or maybe you can tell me how to copy it to a directory.

what if : i create:

mkdir sware //(within home)

//and...

mount /mnt/cdrom/ -w

cd /mnt/cdrom //(the cd rom has rsync-2.6.5.tar.gz within it)

//and...

cp rsync-2.6.5.tar.gz /home/sware/

would this work...what am i doing wrong??

thanX all