> my "homework" this week for our self help group involved
> installing a tarball
A tarball is just a box of files; "installing" that tarball could mean
many different things, depending on what sort of content you have in it
(as you found out!).
At the risk of over-generalising, I'd venture to say that *most* tarball
downloads contain source code (as you'd surmised) - these need building up
into binaries.
A very useful tool here is checkinstall -
http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/ . This can be used to watch
the build process & determine which binaries get installed where. It will
then build a package (.deb or .rpm, according to your taste), which makes
management of that installation much easier later (e.g. when you decide to
replace it!).
Vic.
