Tarballs: The Containers of Source

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Almost all source packages come in the form of tarballs (tarballs and RPM files are both referred to as packages, which is why the icon for such files looks like a little parcel-post box). Tarballs, like ZIP files on Windows systems or StuffIt files on the Mac, consist of a group of files, or even a single file, which have been compressed into one space-saving archive file. In Linux, the most common method of creating such archives is through the tar program, from which the tarball gets its name. Tar files, or tarballs, can be recognized by their file endings, which are .tar.gz or tar.bz2.

You may or may not realize it, but you have already used tarballs in two of the previous chapters. In Chapter 5 you dragged tarballs into your Theme Preferences window to install new window borders and control sets, and in Chapter 9 you untarred a tarball (extracted the archived files) in order to set up and use the pyWings application. The files archived in tarballs can be extracted by using the command line, but to keep things easy, you can just use the simple double- click method that you used in Chapter 9.

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