How to install any software in Linux

Ouch, that is old gear! Where did you find it, at a flea market?

The mfold guys are not doing it in the Standard, Approved, and God-blessed Way. With "tar.gz" files anything can happen, depending on what the packagers put in it. The standard way use a package format called "rpm", which, among the advantages, lets the rpm package manager know how to uninstall it, know what other software the package depends on, so it will warn you if you try to uninstall the rug from under your feet. It also knows what packages each file belongs to, so you can query rpm any time later if you are tidying up and find a strange file and think "what's that file, can I just dlete it?" Rpm also helps you find the corresponding documentation files if some such were included in the package.

Yet tar.gz files (also known as "tarballs") need not be bad, so let's discover what is inside. Do this command:

mkdir ~-mfold-unpack mv mfold-3.2-RedHat-binaries.tar.gz ~-mfold-unpack cd ~-mfold-unpack tar zxf mfold-3.2-RedHat-binaries.tar.gz ls -l

(This is a bit more long-winded than is usually necessary, but I just want to be sure that the tarball does not produce 111 files and directories mixed with all else you have in your home directory. Unless you know all the names of your files, it could be (almost) no way of telling which files came with the tarball and which existed before. Well behaved tarballs produce a single directory whose name is the same as the tarball's name (except the .tar.gz ending). The files in the tarball are then in that directory.)

If the last command produces a single directory name, change to that direcory, and repeat the last command:

ls -l

You will likely find files with mysterious names like README and INSTALL. You should then follow the instructions in those files.

"This server", you mean the file mfold-3.2-RedHat-binaries.tar.gz?

Oh, sorry, I was supposing you knew that. Well, that depends on what browser you use to download the file. In most cases the file will be saved in a "hidden" directory inside your home directory.

Actually most browsers show you a dialog where you can select the folder you want to save the file in. However, on my browser, I have a Quick Download" option that downloads to the same directory as I last selected for that purpose, without bothering me with popups.

I suggest you use the command "find", as follows.

You need a terminal window. In case you have not already discovered that, click on the Desktop background, using the right mouse button, and select "Open Terminal" from the menu. (That works with Gnome, if your flea-market rug came with KDE configured, I don't remember. Look around, look at the menus, or try pressing F2. The latter will probably give you a minimal one-line window where you can type a command, and then you can type "xterm". Once you get up a terminal window, type

cd find . -name mfold--*

(notice the small dot. On modern releases it's not required, but I don't know if that was the case with RedHat 7.)

Once you have found it, you can probably manage to change to the appropriate directory and do the commands above.

Thanks for the appritiation.

-Enrique