I recently installed yellow dog linux on my ps3.
I've downloaded a program via Firefox and i have absolutly no idea how to install it.
can someone give me an easy step-by-step guide how to install each program.

What kind of program is it? Just knowing it's a program isn't enough to tell you how to install it. I am guessing you probably got a zipped folder then you likely to uncompress it first but just say what extension the program has at least?

oh sorry its a .tar.bz2 file

You need to extract the contents of the tarball first, which you can do with "tar xvf filename" (no quotes) in a terminal. 'x' is for extract, 'v' for verbose and 'f' to specify the file. Usually, after doing this, a new directory is created (you'll be able to see if this happens from the output of tar), so you'll want to enter that directory and read any documentation, such as a README or INSTALL file.

i´ve tried extracting but get this error message:

[Neil05@localhost ~]$ tar xvf banshee-1-1.2.1.tar.bz2
tar: banshee-1-1.2.1.tar.bz2: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now



banshee-1-1.2.1.tar.bz2 is the name of the file im trying to install

Obviously you need to be in the same directory as the file. Use cd to change directories.

ok i done that i got to ./configure and i keep getting this error message with anything i try to install;

configure: Package gstreamer-0.10 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gstreamer-0.10.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'gstreamer-0.10' found
configure: error: no gstreamer-0.10 >= 0.10.13 (GStreamer) found

Go and get GStreamer and install it. Which program are you trying to install? Are you sure your distro doesn't have a package for it already?

There is Rythmbox as a music player and totem as video player available to install on yellow dog without needing to compile yourself.

I suppose it is possible to add other software repositories and use the software provided there - so you might find a ready-to-use package "banshee" and need not compile it yourself.

To compile programs you will need to get/install all the neccesary development tools (compiler, the header-files for al the libraries needed to compile the program...)
Read up on the requirements to compile banshee in the readme file that came with the source-code.

yeah see im a complete newbie to Linux so it could have the package i just dont know where to look.
i did install GStreamer but i still get the same result.

and im trying to install banshee. i want banshee so i can use my ipod on it.

Your distro's package management system will be able to tell you which packages are available. You might want to look for the documentation for Yellow Dog. Edit: also you might want to try running ldconfig (as root) and then trying to run the configure script for Banshee again.