Hi Friends,

I'm new to Linux. Can any one tell me how to install ".tar.gz" file?

Thanks in advance :-)

Welcome to LQ!!

.tar and .gz are simply suffixes to denote certain kinds of compression and archiving. Only after extracting will you know the next steps.

First open a terminal and do:
tar -xzvf filename
this will result in a new folder (directory). cd into this and look at the contents. There normally will be some kind of README or other instructions.

But first--if you are installing SW, have you checked to make sure it is not in your package manager? If so that is the easiest method.

$ tar -xvzf saidFile.tar.gz I think, from memory. The last time I did this it created a subdirectory, in the directory in which the command was executed, and put all the stuff in there.

Alternatively,
$ gunzip saidFile.tar.gz
$ tar -xf saidFile.tar x for 'extract', f for file.

You can use "tar tzvf <file.tar.gz>" to see the contents of the file.

You can use "tar xzvf <file.tar.gz>" to extract the contents of the file.

file.tar.gz being replaced by the actual name of the file you want to extract of course.

Typically you would run the extract. One (or more) of the files should be "readme" (or README or Readme - linux is case sensitive so these are different names) and may have suffixes like readme.first. You can read that file and it should contain instructions for how to install the package. If the package is a source distribution it typically goes something like:
configure - Command sets up the makefile(s) based on your system's setup
make - Compiles the source for your system based on the configure you did
make install - Installs the software.

It DOES however vary so it is very important to read the readme files or the instructions from the site you downloaded the tar.gz from. For example the Firefox.tar.gz doesn't contain any instructions so you have to figure it out (or look at the post I did about Firefox explaining it some time back) for yourself.