Hi,
Yes, there are a number of different ways one can do this and this can seem overwhelming. In short, if you are interested in running ONOS as a developer, on the local machine where you have ONOS sources that you built yourself, you can run ONOS like this:
$ONOS_ROOT/tools/build/onos-buck run onos-local
This will build and run ONOS. You can then access the CLI via $ONOS_ROOT/tools/test/bin/onos localhost and GUI via $ONOS_ROOT/tools/test/bin/onos-gui localhost commands.
If you wish to install ONOS as a single node on a machine using merely a pre-built, downloaded onos-*.tar.gz file, you can do that by copying the file to the machine where you want to install it, uncaring the file and then running bin/onos-service server command. This will run the controller in the shell from which you started it. You can also run it as a service (systemd or upstart), but for that you will have to install the appropriate service definition file (and this varies on the version of Linux you use) and start the service. There is a init/README file in the tar.gz that provides brief description on how to do this.
Thomas