What's the Linux equivelant of an exe file?

[dave at tokyocomedy.com (Dave Gutteridge)]

This is one of those questions that seems to be soo obvious to people 
that no one feels the need to have an explanation anywhere. I've been 
looking around the net for ages, and I can't figure out what, on Linux, 
is actually a program.

I've downloaded OpenOffice 1.9 Beta, and would like to run it. I go to 
the /opt/openoffice.org1.9.122/program/ directory and... then what? What 
do I run to start the thing? I've hunted around with ls, and I thought 
bin files were the thing, but they don't seem to run.

I'm trying to run the program, associate the program with .ods files, 
and get some icons in my task bar. But I can't do any of those if I 
don't know what is actually the program.

Help?

Dave