Installing applications
 

A general question from a relative newcomer, but who doesn't consider himself IT illiterate: so I download an application, say a gzip file; it gets unpacked in a package manager; then what? I can find nothing that can tell me what to do next.
Yes, I do use Windows, and yes I am very used to being able to install applications with a single click. But on the other hand, how hard can it be? what am I missing??
Thanks in advance!

First, what is the filetype after it is unzipped? It should be rpm, I believe.

In Konqueror, you can just click on an rpm and it should install.

There a a number of ways software can be packaged. To give an intelligent answer we need to know the distro you use. If it is Debian based it will be the apt-get installer, if it is Redhat based rpm and up2date, Mandriva uses urpmi, Gentoo uses emerge and so on.

Installing a tar.gz package or compiling from source is usually not necessary and can be very tricky.
ZB

If what you get out of the Gzipped file is a bunch of junk and folders and a "configure" file, you've probably gotten the source, which will need compiling. If that's the case, we can walk you through that process. It is something that'll take getting used to.

Distro is Mandriva - and oh dear I have never heard of urpmi! I have also run Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu in the past before settling on Mandriva. Could still never get anything new installed though. Thanks for the pointers, I will give it a try