In any GNU/Linux, the file extension is only a convention - in general, it doesn't determine the kind of file represented. or what it can do.
GNU/Linux users use a combination of tar and bzip/gzip where windows users use winzip for compressing large files. The resulting class of file is called an
archive and the file is popularly referred to as a
tarball.
Which leads to the question: how are you trying to interact with the tarball?
One does not normally expect software in a tarball to just install right from there. You normally extract the contents to a working directory. From there, what you do depends on the contents.
You access the tarball with the tar (
tape
archive) utility. This is installed
by default as part of the core system tools to every major distro. Including openSUSE.
the tar utility should be installed to /bin - check with the whereis command, vis:
Code:
$ whereis tar
tar: /bin/tar /usr/include/tar.h /usr/share/man/man1/tar.1.gz
If you have a file called foo.tar.gz, you can extract it from a terminal with
tar xvf foo.tar.gz
Try that, and report any errors you receive.
<
tar tutorial>
However - in openSUSE, you are not expected to install software from third parties. The YaST repositories contain a vast supply of Free software already pre-configured for your system. Further, anything obtained this way will be automatically updated to the latest available version (if you wish). For whatever you need, always check the repos first.
[edit: export PATH according to instruction by gilead]
If you have any trouble, report the error messages from the terminal. I don't know what you were messing about with /.bash_profile or /.bashrc for.
In future: when you report a problem, try to say what you are trying to acheive, then how you are going about this, then what is going on that gives the problem. This means we don't have to guess.