Quote Originally Posted by foamrotreturns
Just wondering, why do we need to turn it into a tarball? Can't we just install using dpkg?
You can if you are installed to a hard drive, but if you are running off of a Knoppix CD most Debian packages won't directly install, as all of /usr is read-only. I turn it into a tarball so I can just extract the binary I need into the home directory (which I can write to).