In the general case, there is no "installation" with .tar.gz -- just like a .zip file, the archive can contain just about anything, including but not limited to backups of your photos, a collection of email messages, drawings for a CAD system, etc etc.
What you have downloaded is a source tarball. The files in the archive are what a programmer would use to build a binary for their architecture. This particular project looks very much like it was designed for Unix-compatible systems, and will not trivially build on Windows.
Projects which are portable to Windows will often contain something like a Makefile.win32 (perhaps in a subdirectory) with basically a compilation recipe for the make utility, or a proj file for Visual Studio.
The generic Unix instructions for building from a tarball are basically
- Extract the tarball.
- Look for a file named
README or similar. If you find one, it probably reiterates or supersedes the rest of these instructions. The file could also be called INSTALL, though this is often a file with generic installation instructions which are not really specific to this particular project.
- If there are files named something like
Makefile.am you might need to be able to run automake to proceed.
- If there is a file named
configure which is executable, run that. It will try to figure out what components you need to install in order to be able to proceed. If it runs successfully, you can proceed to the next step. If not, you need to understand why it failed, fix the problem, and goto 4.
- If there is a file named something like
Makefile.yourplatform (so Makefile.linux for Linux, Makefile.BSD for *BSD, Makefile.suxix for Suxix, etc) try running make -f Makefile.yourplatform where obviously the name of the Makefile needs to be the correct one from the ones you found.
Otherwise, if there is a file named Makefile (or perhaps GNUmakefile or makefile) run just make. This performs the actual compilation using the compiler, libraries, and auxiliary toolchain utilities which configure picked up back in step 4. If this fails, you have more work to do, probably way over your head unless you are familiar with writing portable programs in the language used in this project (commonly C or C++).
An error message from make simply indicates that something that make tried to run did not succeed. If you need to ask for help, the lines immediately before the error message from make are more useful diagnostics than the final laconic "something failed" message from make.
- Success. There might now be an opportunity to run
make test to check that the binary does what it's supposed to do, and/or make install to copy it to a system-wide location.
For reasonably modern projects, see if the site where you downloaded the source from would also have some instructions, and/or perhaps a collection of pre-built binaries for your platform. Sometimes there are third-party contributed builds for godforsaken platforms even if the main development happens on and focuses on U*x or specifically Linux.
