[Intuition]

Asking a semi-side tangent question here....

I have some RAR files that I have unRAR in windows and can see all the files in Windows but they are unseen across the FTP. The Octane can't see the files unRARed by windows.

So my current solution was to use my Raspberry pi as an in between but getting RAR on Linux is turning into an all day affair so far. 8:30 am to 1:20 PM and still no results getting RAR on a Raspberry PI. Every tutorial leads to installing RAR and that ends up being "Package 'rar' has no installation candidate. 

I modify the sources.list to include the lines given but nothing ever succeeds.. It arrives at various errors and dependency issues. 
"Sigh... Linux... you always wound me... I want you to be an efficient beast... but until software devs begin to even remotely understand user experience and user interface..
you will always be a strange beast for terminal typing preference over UI".

None the less... I have acquired a nice RAR that has a lot of Renderman stuff and I can see all of it in Windows but can't get any of it into Irix except a couple of tgz and tar files and they say they are corrupted or broken when I try to gzip... tar -xvf etc etc the files. 

So I assume that the windows unRAR is killing some critical data somehow that is usable by Irix's file system. 

The next step would be to simply find a RAR solution IN Irix... until at least I can hope that 
the Raspberry Pi in between can unRAR the files that end up being seeable by the Octane. 

Good news is that the Raspberry Pi sees the Octane through FTP with no trouble at all. 

I did notice in the emulation section here.. there is a Topic....

https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-4081.html

and in the Oct 25th section it says 

-added RAR

So I am hoping this means I can unRAR stuff in Irix and keep the file integrity.


--- EDIT ---
By some black magic miracle I successfully compiled UNRAR on my Raspberry Pi.
Imagine after compiling it twice and it failing due to the fact that the folder it wanted to write to didn't have proper permissions set....

... forever sigh....

You would imagine it would know somehow that the destination folder... NEEDS write permissions BEFORE it sets off to do a very VERY long compile..
but instead gets through the whole things after a half hour and says... sorry... no write permissions.

Even I, as a basic script writing, python slinging plebe, would try to write something
that at LEAST writes the output to a temp directory in case of permissions issues.
SHEESH...

Anyways... eventually I find another site unrelated to raspbian that reports the same error...
and gives the usual chmod permissions biz on the critical folders...
that 99% of the time NEED this permissions set to achieve anything along the most basic functionality.
And yet... its not the default.
I remember Bryan Lunduke complaining about this in 2007 with Fedora distro...
and yet here we still are.

I digress. I am unRAR ing the files now and it looks like it unpacked them all with integrity.... to be continued... THOUGH...

If you have a RAR software solution in Irix please still post here... this may not work and I want back up plans.

[Raion]

RAR is a goddamn terrible file format. It's not cross platform and it is technically proprietary.

This is the reason that we don't generally support it but my recommendation is to use p7zip. I know nekoware has an old port of it. I attempted a more recent port but unfortunately there are some problems with it.

Why not just repackage everything in tar or something? Zip and RAR were never heavily supported under the UNIX lands.

[Intuition]

RAR is a goddamn terrible file format. It's not cross platform and it is technically proprietary.

I agree... it is a little disheartening to see tar, tgz, and tar.gz files all wrapped up in a single large RAR file.  

I keep thinking there is no way the data integrity would survive. Ending in an error when trying to unpack OR even during software installation giving an error due to expected file size or similar.

For now... I have them unRAR'ed in Linux and when I look inside each individual tgz, tar, or gz file I see the file inside with no errors so I hope the file integrity is solid. 

Will try to get them on the Octane tomorrow and see if they can install etc.

Then... I will likely make instead a TAR of the whole group and put that somewhere so no one has to deal with the RAR file again.
Some of these files are working versions of corrupted files that came with my drive from Acronym that were not working in general.

So I hope to create a new archive that is built in Irix to be used in other Irix. 

I forgot about p7zip... will get that going tomorrow as well. 

[jpstewart]

So my current solution was to use my Raspberry pi as an in between but getting RAR on Linux is turning into an all day affair so far. 8:30 am to 1:20 PM and still no results getting RAR on a Raspberry PI. Every tutorial leads to installing RAR and that ends up being "Package 'rar' has no installation candidate. 

I modify the sources.list to include the lines given but nothing ever succeeds.. It arrives at various errors and dependency issues. 

Since you mention sources.list, I'm assuming that the OS on your Raspberry Pi is a Debian derivative.  There is no RAR package available.  As Raion pointed out, it is proprietary so it can't be included.  But there is a package named unrar-free in the standard repos that you can install with 'apt install unrar-free' (or whatever other package manager you use).  There's no need to edit sources.list to install an unrar package.

I forgot about p7zip... will get that going tomorrow as well. 

Note that p7zip is also available in the standard repos for Debian and derivatives.  There's a basic p7zip package and a p7zip-full package with more features. You might also have available a p7zip-rar package (in the non-free repository, if you've got that configured) that includes a module allowing p7zip to unpack RAR files!  If you 'apt install p7zip-rar' it will automatically pull in p7zip-full too.

[Intuition]

Well, the unRAR compile worked thankfully.

I do have successful unRAR of all the Tardist, gz, tar, tar.gz files in the single large RAR I unpacked.

Good news is that... unlike when I unRAR them in Windows.. .which creates bad tardist files that Irix Software Manager doesn't like...

The ones I unRAR'd on my Raspberry are working with the Software manager. I have successfully installed 4 of them already. So at least the files are working again.
I am not sure why it is any different but my hunch was that if they were unpacked in Linux it would be a better 1 to 1 than windows was providing.
Plus they are then FTP from the Raspberry to the Octane and I think this keeps everything square.

At least the files are installing which wasn't working before when I unpacked them in Windows and pulled them from Irix that direction.

Though I will install p7zip because I think packing and unpacking IN Irix will maintain best file integrity to preserve these very old Renderman versions.