in reply to Installing Zaurus software

Assuming those are, in fact, more-or-less current Debian packages, they should be an ar archive, with two (gz-compressed) tarballs and a file that has no purpose other then to provide a nice magic number. They were designed to be easy to process with nothing but standard UNIX tools. It looks like this just splits out the ar archive. That should produce three files. debian-binary is there just to function as a magic number. control.tar.gz is metadata -- including a script (normaly sh or bash) that should be run on install, but you can probably ignore the whole file for your purposes. You may want to consider extending this to untar data.tar.gz and just ignore the two other files.

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Re^2: Installing Zaurus software (next)
by tye (Sage) on Aug 30, 2004 at 16:26 UTC

    It was a quick hack. And I don't ignore the control archive since it can contain scripts that do important steps.

    For the next step, I'd teach this script to extract one named file to stdout and write another script that used it to perform the common steps (thus saving disk space, which is often in short supply on a Zaurus):

    • List non-directories in either archive
    • Pipe all control files to 'more'
    • Extract the data (or control) archive 'here'
    • Become root and extract data to / or /home
    • Extract a named file from data archive to 'here' or (as root) to named directory

    But instead I'm ordering a CF RAM card so I can switch to the OpenZaurus ROM.

    - tye        

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