HOW TO INSTALL APPS WITHOUT USING SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT IN LINUX

In Linux, both Debian-based and Arch-based, there are more than a couple of browsers to choose from. Most browsers can be found easily in the repositories, but the better ones(Opera and Vivaldi), still have to be downloaded from the net. Firefox also has other editions which are not in the Ubuntu repositories. To install these browsers, you have to go to the website and manually download the browser first. Of course, Vivaldi and Opera have deb packaging that helps with their installation in Ubuntu-based systems, but this is not the case in Arch. In Arch you have tarballs. Tarballs are archives that many packages are placed in as a way to compress large files into smaller ones as to make downloading hundreds of said packages at any given time more efficient. The way in which a tarball is extracted depends greatly on what extension the maintainer used when compressing. Some typical extensions include; tar.gz, tar.bz2, etc. For this tutorial, I’m going to use a package from the AUR, a tar.gz package.

Most tar files can be extracted using graphical programs such as archive managers, however, it’s faster and easier to use commands once you get the hang of it. Assuming that you saved the tarball in Downloads, you’ll need to open a terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + t to open the terminal, in xfce, this can open a drop down, depending on whether or not it is preconfigured as it is in Manjaro. Once open, you can either use cd and go to downloads like so cd ~/Downloads/, or you can open a file manager window and drag and drop the directory into the terminal. Once in downloads type ls to see the files and folders listed inside the directory. Search for Vivaldi.tar.gz. Once found, you can type gunzip vivaldi.tar.gz, which should leave vivaldi in a plain tarball. Hit ls again to be sure that it worked. This time you should find Vivaldi without a gz at the end. Now to untar the file, use tar -xvf vivaldi.tar, this should leave you with a new directory called vivaldi.

To get into the new directory, you have to use cd again. Very simple, just cd vivaldi and then once there run makepkg -si which continues to build the package and install it. Linux isn’t like your previous operating system. In Linux, you don’t have to commit to anything. Everything is a file or folder under Linux. Installed software can be moved to other parts of the system or even removed with a command.You can probably see where I am heading with this. Now that vivaldi is made, you should be able to run it. If all goes ok, you can then move the entire vivaldi directory to another place. For this demonstration, I’m going to move it to /opt. Pamac naturally does this when installing from the AUR through it. My scripts actually offer to build Vivaldi for you, but only do it within the scope of the home directory. To move to a new directory type: sudo mv vivaldi /opt. This moves the entire directory to the opt directory which is the same directory that many users who install Firefox in a similar way often place it. This isn’t all, with vivaldi in opt you now have to create a symlink to point to it so that you can create a launcher. This is only practical if you don’t want to type it out the long way to start the browser every time.

In order to create a symlink, you have to type the following command from your home directory. Sudo ln -s path to folder path to destination. The destination path is important because it lets the system know that wherever the file is on the system, it is to be ran as a program. Installing scripts is possible in this way, that’s another thing I’m secretly working on. More about that in a few weeks.

This is focused mostly on browsers, but many apps can be installed a similar way.