TAR balls??

Im a newbie in LInux and have heard abt packages distributed in say binaries like tar.gz
Bz.tar.gz some thing similar to that stuff.
What the differecnce between tar.gz and this bz stuff?
Will it make any trouble by saving a tar bz file as tar.gz using ARK??

Also one more qtn.
Some people told me I could convert tar.gz files to .deb using ALIEN.And I did converted some files to deb in this way.But when i installed them (dpkg) I think all that was done is to merely copy the folder into my root directory.

Is it possible to install a file in bz format by saving it into tar.gz and then converting the stuff to .deb using ALIEN??

(Sorry for this innovative Idea)

> What the differecnce between tar.gz and this bz stuff?
gz (gzip) and bz (usually bz2, bzip2) are both compression utilities, but they use
different algorithms to achieve that goal. Both can be invoked by tar with the
command line options -z (gz) or -j (bz2).

> saving it into tar.gz and then converting the stuff to .deb using ALIEN??
Let me suggest a different way, if only because of my inexperience with alien.
So you get this goodstuff.tar.bz2 file. First you check that it will not mess up
your current directory: "tar tjf goodstuff.tar.bz2". This simply lists the contents
- check that it all begins with a directory name.

If that is the case, "tar xjf goodstuff.tar.bz2" (to unpack), then "cd goodstuff".
Then "./configure", "make", and then "sudo checkinstall make install". This last
part a) is a replacement for alien, b) installs the software using the package
manager, and c) leaves you with a file goodstuff-<version>.deb which can be installed
on other comuters without the need to recompile. (checkinstall is a regular
Debian package)

(If the tarfile wants to mess up your current directory, simply create a subdirectory
"mkdir goodstuff", "cd goodstuff", and "tar xjf ../goodstuff.tar.bz2")