This is for newbies in Linux who are trying to learn Linux and in the meantime require to install several apps most of them are available in the repository ( Ubuntu,Suse,Fedora etc .) , installing from repository is very easy but if you download a tarball or a compressed archive of the software package source code then you can easily install it  using these commands at your terminal ( command interpreter )

Assuming ,

• You have downloaded a file named mytarball.gz(replace with whatever is your file name)
• you are in the same directory as where the file resides

tar -zxvf mytarball.tar.gz

./configure

make

sudo make install

assuming that you are in the directory where you downloaded the tar.gz file, for more details on this and how it works, you can read a well written article by Joshua Price here, I dont think it would be worthwhile to repeat the same steps and explanation here .