Gadget Pro

How to Install Xarchiver archive manager in Ubuntu Linux

How to Install Xarchiver archive manager in Ubuntu Linux

By default Ubuntu uses the File-Roller as the main archive manager (an original Gnome application). Its quite good actually but being a Gnome app, for the good or the worse it integrates the Gnomes simplicity (yikes) thus it wont let you change some options such as the default temporary folder location and creating a self extracting archive for instance.

Anyhow, if youre a bit frustrated with it and looking for something else that has the capacity to act as a powerful and fast loading archive management utility, then you should try the one called Xarchiver.

Xarchiver is basically a GUI front-end that uses a lot of built in command-line tools which are built into the GNU/Linux operating system to handle archives + is already the default archive management tool used by LXDE and Xfce desktops too.

It has a pretty simple (bit similar to the File-roller actually) interface and lets you do things like...

*. Add/Rename/Delete or Create an archive (containing emails, text files, etc) from scratch. 

*. Save an archive into a different format.

*. Add or remove passwords.



*. Test for extraction errors.

*. Supports a huge list of file formats such as - 7z, ARJ, bzip2, gzip, LHA, lzma, lzop, RAR, RPM, DEB, tar, and ZIP.

*. As said it also has the ability to let you create self extracting compressed files which is very handy since you can decompress those files without having to have installed an archive manager.

*. Add a comment (another features that File-roller doesnt have).

*. Show the command-line out put (handy while trying to figure out if you had an issue while extracting).



*. A separate "preferences" window (above screen-shot) that lets you configure things such as - ask for conformation while deleting files, change temporary folder location (very useful if you had a "data-full partition" thus the archive manager most probably be unable to extract the content otherwise), show/hide archive commenting, etc.

You can install the Xarchiver in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by entering the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install xarchiver

That should do the trick. Enjoy your new and powerful Xarchiver for creating e-mail archives, out of multimedia files or password protected self extracting ones which makes exchanging archives much more easy and secure + for many more of your other nerdy needs :).

Available link for download