Some projects only give you .tar.gz, what am I supposed to do with them? Is this what people call building from source? Am I supposed to move it to /opt and extract it in Debian based distros? Does this also work on Arch based ones?
Some projects only give you .tar.gz, what am I supposed to do with them? Is this what people call building from source? Am I supposed to move it to /opt and extract it in Debian based distros? Does this also work on Arch based ones?
That’s a gzipped tarball (a compress archive, like a zip), that’s all. It doesn’t determine anything about what’s contained inside of it.
On modern distributions a “
tar xvf <filename.tar.gz>” should unpack it.Check to see if one of the extracted files is a README or INSTALL file of some sort. If there’s just a binary there to run, then that might be all that was included.