It's a really bad idea to use tar.gz packages unless you absolutely have to.

Listen, someone who knew much better than you or I designed apt-get. Apt will both install packages and sort out the dependencies for you. If you insist on using source packages (generally .tar.gz) sooner or later (generally depending on the complexity of the package) you'll break your system.

There's a tutorial on apt-get somewhere at the top of these pages. Alien is designed to convert rpm packages to debs, it won't touch source files.

But if you must, download the tarball (.tar.gz) to your home directory. In Konqueror, right click on it, select actions>extract here.

cd to the new directory that's been created (it'll have a name very similar to the tarball).

Read the readme

Generally, you do

./configure

(if configure is successful)

make

(if make is successful)

su to root and do

make install

But instructions do vary! Read the readme