OldGeezer,

I am not a guru, nor do I confess to any honors of that title, but, as for your question, I think I can help, I hope...

You need to do most of this kind of stuff in a SHELL, or a CLI, or the little icon on the bottom of the screen that looks like a monitor with a shell in front of it...

What it appears to me is, you have a "source" package... In other words, you have to compile the source to create the executable you really want...

First problem, tarballs...

Get into a shell, and at your prompt, do a "cd" to the directory/folder where the tarball is located...

Code:
cuddles@Polaris:/gblusr/Installs$ cd KonqPlugIns
cuddles@Polaris:/gblusr/Installs/KonqPlugIns$ ls
11404-wmfthumbnail-0.2.tar.bz2  wmf-thumbnail-plugin-0.2.tar  wmfthumbnail.la
readme.txt                      wmfthumbnail.desktop          wmfthumbnail.so
cuddles@Polaris:/gblusr/Installs/KonqPlugIns$
As my example above, I have the "cuddles@Pollaris:" prompt, and what follows that, "/gblusr/Installs/KonqPlugIns$" is the directory/folder I am sitting in... Doing the "ls" command is a directory listing command, showing what files exist in that folder....

Now some fun, getting to the files inside a tarball...

if the file is in the form of -=- do this command
-----------------------------------------------------
xxxxxxxxxxxx.tar.gz -=- tar xvfz xxxxxxxxxxxx.tar.gz
xxxxxxxxxxxx..tar.bz2 -=- tar xvfj xxxxxxxxxxxx..tar.bz2
xxxxxxxxxxxx..tar -=- tar xvf xxxxxxxxxxxx..tar

So, since your file is a tar.gz file type, you would do the following command:

tar xvfz filename.tar.gz

the above command will create a folder named "filename" in the folder you have the tarball in, and in the "filename" folder, you will find your source...

Do a "cd" to the "filename" folder, and then the magic begins...

You should find a README or a INSTALL file that should be in text readable format, this file will explain in more detail, what you need to do to compile the source, and install it...

Usuall compile/install instructions follow, closely, to this:

$ make

Some installs from source are vastly different, and have more commands that need to be run, hence, why a README or INSTALL file should be included with the source package.

Hope this helps,
Ms. Cuddles