exe files

[Bogus Zaba]

Mike Goral wrote:
> Just installed this operating system and am slowly learning.  One thing that 
> puzzles me is when I download an installation program to the desktop, I 
> can't figure out how to execute it.  For instance, if I download a media 
> player, I'll get an icon on my desktop for an exe program to install the 
> player.  In Windows, I would just double click this and it would run to 
> install the program.  This doesn't work on this operating system and I'm 
> stumped.  BTW, only very modestly computer literate.  .  Thanks in advance 
> for any help.
>
> Mike G
>
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Mike

You seem to have got a question and a short lecture in reply so far. I 
suspect you wanted something more like help.

The question you got is fair enough - depending on what distro you are 
using you will have been given different tools for installing downloaded 
software. So if you do answer the "which distro?" question in the forum 
you might get a whole lot of helpful responses to your original question.

Generally the packages you download will be either

1. "tarballs" (compressed / zipped up files) which you install by 
unzipping and then reading a plain text file that comes out of the 
unzipping process called "README" or something similar. You will often 
be told in the instructions which steps need to be carried out as "root" 
(ie as the super-user or admin user). Since you seem to be using KDE I 
am guessing that the initial unzipping can be achieved by right-clicking 
on the filename in Konqueror and selecting "Extract" in the service menu 
that appears.


or

2. ".rpm" files which are also compressed files but with a lot of 
machine-readable instructions for how to install built-in. The 
programmes (package managers) that read these rpms and do the 
installation on your system are many and varied. On my Suse distribution 
I always used to use Yast but have now moved onto mainly using one 
called Smart which seems to be very clever.

Hope this gets you started. There is a lot to learn so you might want to 
read a book at some point, but posting to this forum and others like it 
has helped me a great deal.

Bogus

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