[TriLUG] tar help?==> Basic Linux class

[Alan Porter]

WA Brown said the following:
> And me. I live 4 hrs south of Raleigh. I would need some lead time to 
> be able to go. 


Here's your first homework assignment.
http://www.lowfatlinux.com/

It's a pretty comprehensive collection of short tutorials.
Seems pretty valuable for beginners.

My comment to you (WA Brown) in particular... you might want
to take a step back and make sure that you are not "doing
things the hard way".  You mentioned wanting to play MP3's
on a newly installed Linux box, but then you dove into
compiling mpg123 from source.  This is definitely the "hard
way" (unless, of course, your distro of choice is Gentoo).

You might have better luck fishing around to see how others
do it using your distro.  For me, I tend to Google for
strings like "Debian WinAMP" and I end up getting pointed
to applications like "XMMS" (a really nice WinAMP clone).

Lately, having joined the Ubuntu bandwagon, I spend a lot
of time looking at the Ubuntu wiki.  Just search for MP3
and they tell you how to install the appropriate packages
(and thus avoid the pain of building them from source).

There's a lot to be said for using the tools that your
distribution has given you, even though you COULD grab
a random tarball and compile it from scratch.  It all
depends on what level you're trying to learn on.  If you
want to USE a Linux system, then start with the packages
that are made to work with your system!


Alan




.