We finally have a free software tool to extract RARv3 archives on Linux. The news comes from a post on the Free Software Foundation (thanks to Peter Slavek who sent us the tip!) blog which presents a new tool that can extract archives in many different formats, including RARv3.
The tool is called "The Unarchiver" and it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. However, it only comes with a GUI for Mac. For Linux, there are two command line tools: unar (for extracting) and lsar (for listing archive contents) which are currently in beta (but they work just fine, at least they did so in my test). The blog post also mentions that The Unarchiver comes with a license that makes its code easy to reuse so hopefully we will get RARv3 support in applications such as File Roller and Ark:
All of the code is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1, with the option to use later versions of the license, so it will be easy to reuse in other projects that want to include support for RARv3.
Install "The Unarchiver"
A bug has been submitted for the inclusion of The Unarchiver in Ubuntu, but no action has been taken yet. However, Trisquel - a "a fully free operating system based in GNU/Linux, for home users, small enterprises and educational centers" Linux distribution -, has packaged it so I've used the Trisquel debianization to create packages for Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04 so you can install it from the WebUpd8 PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unarchiverThen run "unar" or "lsar" to see the available options.
For those who want to compile it, download the source code from Google Code, extract it and run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgnustep-base-dev libz-dev libbz2-dev libssl-dev libicu-dev
cd The Unarchiver/XADMaster
make -f Makefile.linuxThanks to Peter Slavek for the tip!
