Tarball Hardball

[Zuser264]

I am having something of a circular problem here, I have a Zaurus-5500 that works real great, except when I want to unzip the contents of a .tar file on it, the busybox tar utility doesn't work and gives a whole lot of  "bad tar header, skipping" messages.
I have been speculating that the problem is that the busybox tar utility isn't good for unzipping the tar files that were compressed with more advanced versions of tar. This seems reasonable because the compressed tar utility I found at the GNU website is a good 9MB compared to all of busybox being only 228KB. But here is my main difficulty... all of the versions of tar that I have found on the web are... well... tarballed into a .tar file or compressed similarly.
Am I not using the busybox tar utility properly? Is there a gzip or tar archive utility I can use for WindowsXP before I put the tarballed packages onto the Zaurus? Is WindowsXP corrupting these tarballs when I save them for later file transfer to the Zaurus?

[bluedevils]

.tar is a tar file .tar.gz is a tarball and .gz is a gnu zip file.

use gunzip to unzip and remove the .gz designations
use tar xvf to remove .tar designations and unpackage the file (x - extract, v - verbose, f - file)

[Zuser264]

.tar is a tar file .tar.gz is a tarball and .gz is a gnu zip file.

use gunzip to unzip and remove the .gz designations
use tar xvf to remove .tar designations and unpackage the file (x - extract, v - verbose, f - file)
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Thanks, that is more than I knew, but not a single file I have loaded onto my Zaurus has worked properly with the "tar" or "gunzip" utilities that were on the Zaurus 3.1 ROM installed when I got the unit.

I think that I will have to install a heftier version of these utilites.
Does the Open Zaurus ROM that seems to be popular here sync with the Qtopia Desktop program?

[bluedevils]

hmmm...I'm on cacko 1.23 which is based off the sharp rom and I have not had any problems.  Are you sure you downloded the files properly?

[Zuser264]

hmmm...I'm on cacko 1.23 which is based off the sharp rom and I have not had any problems.  Are you sure you downloded the files properly?
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Yes, I save the file to a WindowsXP computer, and then use a Sharp-distributed Trolltech/Qtopia File Manager program to transfer files to the Zaurus 5500. All of the .ipk files that I have downloaded have installed properly, with the exception of a few that claimed reliance on package items not included or installed already, so I think files aren't getting corrupted along the Zaurus loading process.

I think I have just conceived of a solution, uncompress the files on the WinXP computer before transfer to the Zaurus, if I can find a WinXP compatible tar and gunzip utility. I am sort of wary of installing a whole new OS ROM, because the one I have isn't broken and aside from this tarball problem has all of the features of alternative ROMs that I would know how to use.

Say... thanks for your help. I'll post an address to such a utility if I can find it.

[bluedevils]

I think winrar supports both.

[periodontist]

I can confirm that winrar supports both on my WinXP machine.  Also, if you go to my favorite Win Freeware site http://www.nonags.com, you are sure to find several free compression utilities that can also handle the task.  Good luck.

[qx773]

Sometimes when you download *.tar files with Internet Explorer, an extra *.tar gets appended to the file name, like *.tar.tar.  Make sure that the filename is exactly the same on Windows as on the original download site.

Older versions of Netscape tended to treat binary files as text files and replace what Netscape thought were line feed characters with carriage return / line feed pairs, corrupting the binary file.

[speculatrix]

you can uncompress and untar files this way:

gzcat xyz.tar.gz | tar xf -

or
cat xyz.tar.gz | gunzip | tar xf -


if gzcat isn't on your system, you can make it thus:
  su -
  cd /usr/bin
   ln -s gzip gzcat

gzip, gunzip and gzcat are all the same program, it works out what to do from the name the program was invoked with