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 .

Ever wished to have a Yahoo Webcam chat in your Linux but all you could get was a text chat using pidgin , well for those who did not knew this there is a special multi protocol IM client ( these are those that support multiple chat networks like aol,msn,yahoo,gtalk etc .) it’s name is KOPETE and believe me it is a wonderful. It comes already installed with KDE version of  Ubuntu ie. Kubuntu  but you can get it installed on Ubuntu Gnome from your Synaptic package manager

Using Kopete, you can easily have a Webcam chat with your friends inside Linux .