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| Question: | I don't know how to install after Ark has finished downloading.Files appear in Dolphin. What do I do next? To use the download.
Regards,
Georgina
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| | Answer: | Sorry if this is too excessive..or you already knew all this.
In general you don't have to download any programs to install them yourself in most linux distributions (including SuSE). Most distributions come with a package manager which only needs you to select the program you want to install and then does all the work (downloading, installing, configuring...) itself. If you are familiar with "AppShops" on cellphones think as them as a downgraded version of a linux package manager. Now it gets a bit difficult for me as I haven't see a suse system since 6.4...so have to rely on some external documents on how to use the package manager in suse. Hope this link helps: http://en.opensuse.org/YaST_Software_Management. If I remember right "Yast" used to be the configuration tools of suse. Should be easy to start from the menu (I guess somewhere in settings there but really no clue). Once started and selected the "Software" Module you are ready to search for packages (programs). Just search for "ark" and then install it. A package manager makes sure all other necessary packages needed to run the program you want to install are installed also (Like for example software libraries, documentation or such). Those are called dependencies and by this system a package manager is able to also do a clean uninstall again...meaning if YOU select "ark" to install for example some other dependencies might get installed also. But as you never selected those manually they get uninstalled again once you uninstall "Ark" yourself.
So now to the case you want to install software not included in the standard "repository" (A repository is more or less an archive of applications and the instructions to install them. Package manager make use of repositories to see what software they can install). This shouldn't be needed for "ark" as it is a pretty standard application and I see no reason why it shouldn't be in the standard repositories of suse. But of course no distribution is able to cover the full range of available software with their official repositories. The first thing to do is usually looking for a non-standard repository containing the application you want to install (This can be a bit tricky...some programs lists of repositories for the different distributions on their homepage but in general google is your friend here). Once you find a repository (and think it's trustworthy enough) you can add it to your package manager like this: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Add_package_repositories
So, why do I tell all this when you asked about installing a downloaded program. Most important because it has some very serious advantages installing software with the package manager. You can be sure the software fits your system (No need to figure out if you need a 32 or 64 bit version, what processor you have or if the software still works with your current version of the linux distribution) and you can easily get rid of it again. Using a package manager should be almost always preferred over installing software manually and is usually a lot easier (And hey...who really wants to visit the webpage of each program you want to install and download it manually? Let's leave that to the hard to use operating systems ;)).
But now to your real question...what to do with software downloaded manually. That's a though one...as there is no real standard way outside of the distribution's package manager to install software and it also depends what you downloaded. Suse is based (at least I think so) on the RPM package manager (yes, I know...the PM in RPM already means package manager ;)) so you might get across some ".rpm" files. Those are file that can still be installed with your package manager. Usually only a click on them in dolphin should start this process. I still suggest against using this method of installing software as for it to work you must be sure you downloaded a fitting ".rpm" file for your distribution. But assuming from your question you didn't download a ".rpm" as a click on it should have started the install...what leads me to ".tar.gz" or ".tar.bz2" files. These files are just archives containing other files and folders (If you know them...much like .zip or .rar files). For software in the linux world they are most of the time used to distribute the source code of a program. To unpack them I usually would suggest "Ark" on KDE but I guess that is kind of contra-productive in this question ;). From the shell (console/command prompt) those files can be usually extracted with a "tar xf <filename>" (at least I hope so...I still remember needing "tar xjf ..." for .bz2 or "tar xzf ..." for .gz files. But I didn't need to specify exactly what kind of archive it as for a long time now here on my distribution so I guess that's the same for the other linux distributions also). And now it really depends on what is contained in the archive. If it is a archive with precompiled version of the program you should find some executable file in it you can just start and hope it work. If it's a source code archive the work only starts now. A quick search gave me this link about how to compile software: http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/softinstall.html. But this only covers autoconf packages...the cmake build system used by most KDE application nowadays works differently again. Also you need to install a lot other packages on your linux system first to get any sourcecode to compile (The most obvious there is gcc, the c compiler of the gnu project, but usually a lot other development packages are required also).
So...installing software from source code is for sure pretty interesting (and well worth learning)...but needs some time, trial and error and basic understandings of a linux system. If this is just about getting ark to install to use it I really suggest trying it with the package manager first. Source code installs are pretty nice for development or if you want to change the code of a program yourself...but if that is the case I assume you know already very well how to compile something.
Hope this was helpful in some way.
Disclaimer: As always, sorry for the bad English...hope it's still understandable
Edit: Spelling
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