Introduction

Some major companies distribute their programs not as RPMs but in 'tar.gz' archives ('tarballs').
The reasons for this are simple: not all Linux distributors use RPM as their package format of choice, and even the distributors who do so follow different guidelines. For licensing reasons Linux distributors often are not allowed to provide customized RPMs of these archives.

Such programs are for example the Adobe Acrobat reader, the Netscape browser suite, Macromedia's Flash plug-in or Real Networks's Real Player.
Taking the installation of Adobe's Acrobat Reader 5.05 as an example, this page explains how to install these programs.

Getting And Unpacking The Package

Download the package from the company's web site to your home directory.
Tip: I've created a special subdirectory for downloaded programs in my home directory, called 'src'. Most browsers allow you to specify a default download directory.

Unpack the archive with

In GNOME's or KDE's file manager just clicking on the package file should work, too.
Tip: Tarballs should upon extraction create a new sub directory where the files are extracted to. New players in the Linux market sometimes 'forget' this and create packages which extract into the current directory. Not nice, because after a while you might lose the overview which files in the directory belong to the new package and which to other, previously extracted ones. You can check this before extraction with the command tar tzfarchive. In the case of Adobe's reader, you'll get:

./
./INSTALL
./MANIFEST
./README
./LICREAD.TXT
./LINUXRDR.TAR
./COMMON.TAR

This tells you that the archive will be extracted into the current directory, so it might a good idea to put that archive into a directory of its own and extract it there.

Some companies do not even provide archives, but just one huge file (e.g. 'rp7_redhat6.bin'). These files are just giant self-extracting and -installing executables. To install them, just put a './' in front of the filename and hit the 'Enter' key (e.g../rp7_redhat6.bin). If you get an error like bash: permission denied, run chmod +x filename to make the file executable and then execute it again.
In some rare cases, the archive is distributed uncompressed ('file.tar'). Such archives are extracted with tar xf filename.

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Installation

If you have a previous version of the program installed, be it RPM or otherwise, backup changed files (e.g. 'bookmarks.html' in '~/.netscape') and uninstall it.
The directory with the unpacked Acrobat archive contains two files of special importance. One is README and the other is INSTALL. The first contains installation and usage instructions, the second is the installation script. In order to run the installation script successfully, check if you've got the 'ed' package installed (rpm -q ed), the installation script needs this command.

Before going on to installing the software, switch to the 'root' account with su. Now start the installation with ./INSTALL.

Use the SPACE key to get through the license blob, type 'accept'. Now Adobe prompts you for an installation directory.

Hint: Most commercial programs tend to suggest paths like '/usr/local/program', which means you will end up with lots of program related directories in '/usr/local'. If you don't care about that, go with the default, it makes no functional difference.
To keep things a little tidier, however, I've created a directory called '/usr/local/opt', which I use to install such misbehaving programs in. So I change the installation path here to '/usr/local/opt/Acrobat5', confirm the next question to have the new subdirectory created, and the installation procedure ends.

You can now delete the directory you've installed the application from, but you should keep the original package in case you want to / have to re-install the program later.

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Customization

So, the program is installed. But how to run it?

If this were a Mandrake Linux RPM, chances were the application icon would show up automatically in the menu. Since it isn't, you have to do configure that for yourself, e.g. with MenuDrake. All you need to know is the full path to the executable which starts the program. The friendly README file from the Acrobat archive mentions it, it's '/usr/local/Acrobat5/bin/acroread' if you went with the default installation path.

Hint 1: If you don't know the name of the executable and it's mentioned nowhere, let Linux find it for you:

find . -perm -700 -type f

This command will find all executable ('-perm -700') files ('-type f') in the current directory and subdirectories ('.'). Of course, chances are you get more than one hit, but it usually reduces the number of files to try out quite a bit.

Hint 2: Non-RPM archives usually do not install their executables in the standard Linux directories for executables (/usr/bin/, /usr/local/bin). If you want to start these from a console, you will have to provide the full path to the executable.
The easiest way to get rid of this nuisance is creating a symbolic link (i.e. an entry which just points to a file in a different directory) of the executable in one of those directories with the 'ln' command (requires 'root' privileges):

ln -s /usr/local/opt/Acrobat5/bin/acroread /usr/local/bin

puts a symbolic link called 'acroread' into '/usr/local/bin'. Now you can start the program by just typing acroread.

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