Xarchiver is a front-end for various command-line archivers, which makes the task of handling archives easier. Since it is just a front-end, you will still need to install the command-line utilites which will handle the archive formats you are insterested in.
As of today Xarchiver supports the following file formats:
| File extension | Archiver tool |
Comments |
|---|---|---|
| .zip | zip (or zip3) & unzip | One of the most known archive formats. To create ZIP archives there are two tools: the older (but well-tested) zip 2.x and the newer zip 3.x. |
| .tar | GNU tar | Only GNU tar tool is supported by the archiver. The 'tar' provided by the default OS distribution (busybox) is very limited and does not work with Xarchiver. Please install the gnutar package to be able to work with .tar (and also with .tar.gz and .tar.bz2) packages. |
| .gz, .tar.gz | gzip | gzip is a simple tool which can compress just a single file. Despite this, gzip is very widerly used, especially in the Unix world, often together with tar, e.g. tar builds a single uncompressed archive containing many files, and then gzip is used to compress this single file. |
| .bz2, .tar.bz2 | bzip2 | bzip2 is very similar to gzip, but provides much better compression (at the cost of compression speed). It is also often used together with tar to create .tar.bz2 files. |
| .rar | unrar | This is an archive format widely used in DOS and Windows world, by Eugene Roshal from Russia (RAR stands for Roshal ARchiver). Since it is closed-source, no compression tool is available for the ARM platform. Fortunately, the source code for the uncompressor tool are free so you can uncompress it and recompress it to some open format, like zip. |
| .7z | 7zip | 7zip is an open-source archiver from another Russian programmer, Igor Pavlov. It uses a custom compression algorithm called LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm) which usually gives much better compression ratio than even bzip2. Xarchiver can handle .7z archives, but unfortunately, the command-line archiver (p7zip) has not been ported to Maemo yet. |
| .lzma | lzma | This archive uses same comression algorithm that 7zip uses, but uses a different archive format and usage paradigm, similar to gzip and bzip2. Xarchiver can handle such files, but unfortunately the lzma utility has not been ported to Maemo yet. |
| .iso | built in Xarchiver |
Xarchiver can handle .iso files (CD and DVD images) internally. You can view what's inside the image and extract files from it. |
For more information about Xarchiver, please refer to its home page