> 1) use dpkg on .deb files. dpkg -I my_package.deb as root installs. > 2) gzip -dc my_targz.tar.gz| tar xvf - should work. tar does not need > the hyphen before its arguments. or, more simply, tar -zxvf my_targz.tar.gz the z option (not in some other unix version) causes gzip compression/ decompression --