I've been installing .tar.gz files effortlessley for awhile now, but latley whenever i try a ./configure my terminal has been saying "no file or directory".

Any idea what might have gone wrong? Is there any way that i may have accidently deleted that command? and if so how do i re-install it?

Can you please post a detailed error message so that we can have a look at what could be going wrong.

I'm not sure i know what you mean by detailed error message, but here is exactally what happened:

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e7...reenshot-2.png

Well, from the output, there isn't a file called "configure" in the directory you are working in. You need to untar the rar file and enter into the extracted directory then look for installation instructions. You could also save yourself time and effort by using apt/synaptic to install rar or unrar.

I can get rar in the synaptic package manager? i didn't know that

But as far as having to find the install instructions and all that, this isn't the only program this has happened with. I have about 8 new programs that i tried to install yesterday, and ./configure didn't work on ANY of them.

I don't have insane amounts of experience with this OS, or even installing files, but to me that seems a rather high occurance, and previously only about one or two of the many programs I had installed wouln't install through ./configure.

but i'll try it and let you know what happens

Thanks!

Not all software is installed by using ./configure, make and make install. With some, you just do make and make install, with others, its just "make install". The installation instructions usually have the commands you should enter to build the package.

hmm... well i did try just the make and just the make install but those didn't work either :/

It's difficult to comment without an "ls" of the directory. Configure isn't a bash command it's a shell script written to perform the compile process and insure dependencies are met. Every tarball you install will have a unique configure script. The name configure is a convention and I've seen some packages with installation shell scripts with different names that may also perform the make and perhaps modprobe in the case of a driver. If the package doesn't require compiling, e.g. Perl or Python scripts, there will still be a makefile script which you run by running "make" and "make install". There will almost always be a README file that will tell you what to do.

Aren't there any instructions for installation? Like I said, there are many ways to install tarballs, so you need to follow whatever instructions were given by the developers. The instructions are usually included inside the packages tarball. The ones I listed in my previous post were just examples and won't necessarily work with your tarball.