OK, I feel silly. I even MADE ipkgs back around the 5000D time frame and this is evading me, so I feel even more stupid.
But I can't unpack ipkgs.
Here's the deal: I want to try out xmame, but I don't seem to have enough free storage to have the ipkg on the tired ol' 5000D and also install it.
Fine, thought I, I'll just untar the ipkg files and try manually putting things in places. As I recalled, .ipkg files were just .tar.gz files... or so I thought...?
But using gnu tar 1.13.25 (cygwin; I was playing games so was in Windows at the time), I get this message (using the bzip2 ipk as a sample):
$ tar -xzf bzip2_1.0.2-r0_arm.ipk
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Hmm. OK, maybe somehow it wasn't really gzip'd. If I "less" the thing, I can see some header text at the beginning. Let's try just tar'ing the thing (after renaming it and trying a few other ideas, all with the same result):
tar -xf bzip2_1.0.2-r0_arm.tar.gz
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Um, OK. Maybe it has something to do with the version of tar I'm using. But trying it on the Z does me no favors either; either "invalid gzip magic" or "invalid tar magic".
What am I doing wrong? How can I just unpack the blasted .ipkg file, preferably on my desktop?
(yeah, I know, I know, buy more memory, but the 64M SD card is doing fine for everything except this, and I imagine xmame is going to be too slow to be useful, so this is just for jollies... and besides, now I'm annoyed that I can't figure it out!)
-->VPutz
