Commercial software on Linux - RAR

I found that I had an old registration key for WinRAR laying around. Since I don't use Windows any more at home, I checked and found that there is indeed a commercial Linux version of the software available nowadays.

RAR is a proprietary archive format that was widely used in the 90's and the next decade when the Internet became a popular place to share software and media files. It has better compression ratio than ZIP, has strong encryption and very good error recovery capabilities. I have some memories from my time as a student of keeping a WinRAR binary on a floppy and use it to decompress and compress files transferred from and to the Internet.

I'm not going to debate over FOSS vs. commercial software in this post. If we weigh in such arguments, there are no reasons to use anything else than the LGPL licensed 7Z (p7zip) or tar with bzip2, gzip or xz (and their parallel variants), but that was not the point of this post.

There is also a freeware unrar program and libunrar library available for Linux and Unix (for Fedora in the rpmfusion repository), but it is only able to extract files from RAR archives.

To be able to create RAR archives, you have to use the official software from RARLAB. You can use it for 40 days. After this you have to buy a license key. The license is fair; software upgrades have been free (at least until now).

To easily install the RAR program (instead of downloading from the official web site and manually install it) on Fedora, there is a repository available at negativo17.org. This way also updates are nicely handled. Just add the repo file:

sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo http://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-rar.repo
sudo yum -y install rar

As far as I can tell from the RARLAB site, the license for WinRAR and RAR for Linux/Unix are the same and the later versions use the same license key. Just put the rarreg.key in your home directory (for a single user license) and begin archiving.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR
[2] http://rarlab.com/download.htm
[3] http://negativo17.org
[4] http://negativo17.org/repos/
[5] http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration


Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Steelseries Arctis 7 headset in Linux

Bild
UPDATE. This headset works without modifications in Linux after the changes were committed to pulseaudio in 2017.  The Steelseries Arctis series headsets are very comfortable. You can wear this headset all day long thanks to the comfortable head strap. Steelseries Arctis 7 There are three models, Arctis 3, 5 and 7. The last one is the most expensive and has wireless connection. Arctis 5 is basically the same without wireless (only USB connection). Arctis 3 has only analog inputs. I've got the Arctis 7 model and of course I'm using it with Linux. There were some issues setting it up. It works fine in Alsa, the device is recognized. You do have to adjust sound levels, at least the mic has too low sound level. Use alsamixer on command line to adjust all volume levels for the headset to 100% (the two outputs and one input). But Pulseaudio has some issues. Only the mono device (chat output) and microphone is visible. This is because the headset uses a non-supported co
Läs mer

Hard disk Firmware update on the Linux command line

Sometimes you will find that your hard disk is slow, or there are some other issues with disk performance. If you are lucky, the disk is not broken. It could have some firmware bugs, and if you are even more lucky, the manufacturer could have issued a firmware update. I've updated several hard disk firmwares in the past. Usually you have to use a boot disk with DOS or something to update the firmware. Why updating firmware? One of my hard disks in the past needed a new firmware because it was dropping out from a RAID controller. It began working fine after the firmware update. The latest hard disk that needed firmware update was Seagate 15k.7 ST3450857SS SAS. I noticed that the disks sometimes slowed down during writes and even stalled. I use two 450GB disks in software RAID 1. By googling I found that there were other people having similar problems with the same disk and that there were actually a firmware update available from Seagate. Also Dell, HP and IBM seems to ha
Läs mer

Using IBM ServeRAID M1015 card in Linux

Bild
The FusionMPT SAS2 based cards by LSI are cheap RAID cards that perform well in RAID 0 and 1 under Linux with SSDs and ZFS arrays. They are used in many 1U servers with one or two disks. They are also a popular SAS 6.0 / SATA III controllers for enthusiasts. You can get them cheap on ebay. Before SATA III was common on motherboards, this was THE card to get. It can still be useful if you need SAS disks or additional disks or have a need for disk enclosures. It is identical to the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9220-8i. The same hardware is also used in LSI 9240 and LSI 9211. It is possible to use the BIOS from another card (crossflashing) to change the features of the card. There are a few different BIOS files you can use. Specifications:  Official LSI information 8-lane, 5 GT/s PCI Express 2.0 Identical to LSI 9240-8i card 6 Gb/s per port Two x4 internal SFF-8087 connectors Controller LSISAS2008 Low cost SATA+SAS RAID solution RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and JBOD mode >2TB
Läs mer