Hi there
A newbie first post ever on the internet.Running suse 10, having installed and got firefox up a nd running and feeling quite pleased with myself i set about installing spamassin,downloaded the tar ball and extracted via perl after about two hours, yea i thought cracked it i am now a linux usr. went into the /usr/bin via root found the executable and tried to run it no joy. and then out of curerieosty tried some more of the binaries there no joy. I am sure that there is a fundamental thing that i am doing wrong I have tried the forum and different searches for a answer . i am not sure if i am in the right forum for this post

For binaries located in /usr/bin there is no need executing them being logged as root, only the executables in /usr/sbin can be executed by root.
To execute a binary there are many ways.
You can execute it from the full path like :
$:/usr/bin/whereis
you can also execute it from the folder itself like :
/usr/bin/$: ./whereis (you just add './' before the filename, that means it's a file located in the directory you are

But for files located in /usr/bin you don't need to do any of the above.
In any terminal and in any path only by typing the executable it will run.

I also wonder... did you log into the gui as root and try double clicking it? A greatmany apps are terminal based and won't give you any GUI output.

When you say, "no joy," you don't tell us what happened?

Here's some things to know:

(1) Even an executable program must have the --x permission-bit set, in order for you to be able to execute it. If you enter the command ls -l filename, you will see a series of letters on the left hand side that look something like this: -rw-r--r--. The last nine characters are "three groups of three," the letters "rwx" for "read, write, execute." The first group is for "you, the owner." The next three is for "anyone in your group." The third is for "anyone." In the example shown, no one can execute this file as a program, because no one has been given execute permission. Use the chmod command (see man chmod) to give at least yourself execute-permission.

(1a) Linux loves the message: permission denied. Yes, it is rather designed to be cryptic.

(2) By design, Linux does not assume that a command that you type refers to "an executable file in your current directory," as MS-Windows or MS-DOS does. If you want to execute a file in your current directory, precede the filename with "./" as in ./myprogram. { Unix/Linux directories are separated by a forward slash, not a backslash, and "." is a shorthand for "the current directory." }

(3) Unix has a $PATH variable which allows it to search in specified directories for a file corresponding to the command that you have entered. Try echo $PATH. See: man path, man export, man set.

thanks for the replies very grateful for the advise i have been trying years to get a grip on linux now semi retired I have a bit more time, but still very frustrated, tried the ./telnet it just sat there doing nothing just changed dir i suppose., tried ./spamassassin which is the program which iwas trying to run in the first place, then command just sat there looking black at me.I had opened a terminal in the usr/bin the icons are mostly little gears. i have a icon for for the spamassassin also a file with a pl on tried clicking that and it open the script, so that was when i tried the other icons just going through them to see what happens they just do nothing ,so i assumed that i was doing somthing wrong somwhere and some how, must admit i havnt tried the chmod at the moment. basicley what iwant to do is to install a program and the run it I thought i had found the secret when i downloaded fire fox and got it running, so i tried the spamassassin as a tarball extracted and compiled ok but unable to run it, hence the post and a lot of frustration to boot