[SGVLUG] Possible Presentation Topic

[A. J. Stasney]

Greetings... As a valuable companion presentation to "Command Line Tips..."
consider a talk some time this winter on software installation, emphasizing
command-line downloading, unarchiving, uncompressing, and if required
compiling.  Management of RPM's  (these appear to be the same as .mdk
files for legacy Mandrake users) is a related issue.  This is something 
that would
be of great value to me, but perhaps if there's general interest it 
would qualify as
a good presentation topic.

I've done reasonably well at self-instruction on the command line in 
general,
but despite two years of frustrating effort, reading endless and ultimately
useless books, guides, manuals, etc.  I have NEVER succeeded in getting
any  .tar.gz or similar file, whether binary or source code, installed 
and working.
The variety of errors and roadblocks has been endless, and I suspect not 
only
my incompetent attempts but flaky software - but there's no way to be sure.
I would really like to see step-by-step examples (for both binary and 
source),
of downloading an archive, placing it in an appropriate folder, figuring 
out
if it needs compiling and if so doing it, and locating the extracted 
executable
file, dealing with permissions, and executing the file (including making 
a desktop
icon for KDE and/or Gnome).  It seems inexplicable, but no documentation
I have ever managed to find (and searching has included hours on the web 
and
in the CIT bookstore) has so obvious a thing as a capture of relevant 
parts of
a sequence of command line screens for operations like the one described.

Thanks to those who will consider the suggestion, and take the time to 
reply.