I’ve downloaded a compressed (tar.gz) file, and have googled how to convert it to a .deb so I can install it on my Ubuntu 18.04. I can’t find anything that works. The suggestion that starts with “./configure” does nothing when I enter “sudo ./configure [filename.tar.gz]” although I’m in the same directory as the .tar.gz file.
I tried to get access to “Alien”; couldn’t find a way to download it.
Tried to first convert the .tar.gz to zip in hopes of finding a solution, but the conversion failed.
If you’ve dealt with my previous queries (Thank you, incidentally), you know that I’m still a very raw noob.
As usual, thank you very much for sharing your expertise.
Tom Markham
Hi Tomm,
First you have to extract the zipped tarball, with something like:
tar -xzf filename.tar.gz
Than you can try the ./configure part (possibly inside the directory the tar command produced). But depending on the contents of the tarball this will or will not work. If it is a source tarball, it may work.
How can I convert a tar.xz file to a deb file? 
Hi Unseeable871,
Welcome to our forums.
If it is an application packed into a tar.gz, you could try checkinstall. It is available in the default Ubuntu repositories.