I am a ms baby jumped ship cold turkey about 2 months ago. I really need some help I am trying to load hylafax to simplify my life. I down loaded download manager put it on my desktop. I had no options Now trying to load a tar.gz has become very trying to me. Every command I enter in Bash is bad and linux for dummies is not helping I am running fedora 7 x86 and on top on this problem some how I have turned off my software updater. It will not work. Please help
thanks Craig

My general approach is to un-tar the .tgz file in the /tmp directory (This is so I don't leave a bunch of install files I don't need in my home directory).

A '.tgz' file, also referred to as a 'tarball' is a 'tape archive' or 'tar' file which has been compressed using gzip.

I'm going to call your tarball 'hylafax.tgz', although the file name will almost certainly have a version number...

1) Move the tarball into the /tmp directory, and then cd into the /tmp directory. {neither of these is strictly necessary, but it makes it easier to explain}.
2) run the command
tar zxvf hylafax.tgz

This will probably create a 'hylafax' directory under /tmp. 'cd' into this directory. You will probably find a README file, as well as a 'configure' shell script. Read through the README for any platform specific instructions, then run configure. When you configure, you will see that the configure script makes sure that your computer has everything that it needs to build the hylafax package. When the configure script has finished correctly, type 'make'. Once this is through, su to root, and type 'make install'.