Ubuntu tutorial for beginners: How to install .deb and tar file

First think is that it's not much difficult to use ubuntu. Every operating system constitutes of process management, memory management and file management. You no need to understand process and memory management, let ubuntu to do this for you.

File system in ubuntu is pretty simple to understand. Like windows has its C: drive as its main drive on which windows is installed ubuntu has its root as its main directory which is denoted by "/" , and all other folders are inside its root directory. But unlike windows can have different drive to work with ubuntu has only its root directory as whole space available to ubuntu inside which user is allowed to use only home folder to save files or to create files or folders.

So path for home folder will be
 /home 
where "/" denotes root and home tells name of folder.

Inside home folder it contains many other folder including user folder named after user name, this user folder consists of pictures, photos, downloads, movie, desktop etc.

So to work on desktop your path should be
/home/username/desktop

Ubuntu have terminal same as command prompt in windows, terminal has desktop as its default working directory. You should be familiar with terminal to use ubuntu effortlessly. Although ubuntu have software centre or wine installed on it to get software automatically by some clicks but you should know how to install software in ubuntu manually so that anything that is not available on wine can be installed. Every linux based system have different package support such as deb, rpm, tar etc , ubuntu supports .deb and tarball(.tar) extension files.

How to install deb files
Installing .deb files are very easy but you should have gdebi installed on your system. To install gdebi open your terminal and type

sudo apt-get install gdebi 

Now to install any .deb extension file open terminal and change its directory to path where your .deb file is stored. For suppose file is in download folder than use below steps

cd '/home/username/downloads' 

than after changing working directory to install file use command

sudo dpkg -i file_name.deb 

(remember during installation if there is an error related to packages that are not installed use sudo apt-get -f install to install them)

How to install tarball files
Installing tarball (.tgz or .tat.gz) is little complex to understand. The first thing to do with every tarball file is to extract it, do this by right clicking on it and select extract or use below command

tar xfvz file_name 

after this continue with the installation manual that can be found in the extracted files.

Some useful link for ubuntu beginners
Install a single package file
Compling things on ubuntu