Re: Basic Info Sites, Uncompressing The Data!

["L. C. Robinson" <lcr@draken.localnet>]

On Wed, 14 Jan 1998, Max G. Swanson wrote:

> Many of us, I think, are turning to Linux after seeing
> what a mess the WIN 95 scene is becoming, especially for
> V.I users; and we have to get out of the memory
> straightjacket of DOS at least for some apps.
> 
> The DOS standard for uncompressing files is, of course,
> the ZIP protocol with all its variants.  Of course there
> are others such as ARJ.  A lot of

And there are superior Linux versions of these within easy
reach (see below).

> the stuff on the Linux sites, including the Blinux pages,
> is in other formats such as .tar.gZ or RPM.

.tar.gz (same as .tgz) format files have been used in the
internet and Unix world for years.

> As word of Linux spreads beyond its core constituency,

Word of Linux has already spread well beyond its "core
constituency", whatever that means.  It is an indispensable
part of the internet: many of the best and largest ISP's,
mine included, run on Linux, and a large percentage of the
internet web sites run on top of it.  It is a major
operating system already.

> we really need a place to get some of these programs.

There are a great many places where this stuff is available,
in both source and binary forms.  For info about where these
sites are, see http://www.linuxnow.com/ or
http://www.linux.org/

You can probably find anything you want, whether it be
software, or information about Linux, through these sites
(and these are just two key ones, among many: see their
list of mirrors).

> running Sun-OS 5.5.1 generic.

Sun machines run Unix, and no respectable commercial Unix
system today would be without these indispensable utilities
(speaking of tar and gzip).  I used to use an internet
provider that used a Sun machine, though, for shell accounts
where the PATH did not include a lot of key directories (we
left that ISP, because of their incompetence).  We just
revised our PATH in our personal shell startup files (the
personal equivalent of autoexec.bat each Unix or Linux 
account or login user can have).

Here's a hint: mtools is a Unix based MS-DOS access package
that includes a little shell utility that invokes gzip and
tar together, so that to extract an archive, all you need to
do is say:
uz package_name.tgz
in the proper directory, of course.  Let me know if you want
a copy, through email, but check first to see if your Sun or
Linux system has it already (making sure your PATH includes
all appropriate directories).

If you want to get hold of rpm, go to www.redhat.com, or
http://www.rpm.org/, or one of RedHat's many mirrors.

L. C. Robinson
reply to infynity@cyberhighway.net (a family account)

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