I Came a-cross some linux compression formats but not sure how to open them in Windows XP from the website


http://www.distrowatch.com

http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php...ution=sorcerer

this linux version compression some of the iso I think in the following formats

sorcerer-ia32-20040513.iso.rz
sorcerer-ia32-20040513.iso.lzma
sorcerer-ia32-20040513.iso.bz2

and the full path to these files
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...er/iso/stable/

also another file format I have never heard of

sorcerer-ia32-20040505-20040513.iso.xdelta


Repost under here in case the main directory does not give me a reponse on my compression quesion


:REPOSTED:

Is this Linux for Pentium 4 based computers?
I thought it was for the 386 based computers but I am not sure yet, I think distrowatch puts it in the 386 type but not sure

anyway are the normal iso files the same as the compression formats their like those 160MB uncompressioned are they 300MB files?

If so why don't other linux use these compressions for their iso images? why don't they compression the iso files to make it easy for modem users to download , I mean 7 CDs for debian , I could download one or two off my modem with no problems but It would take me a long time to download 7 Cds with my modem and even if I get the First CD and download the rest from linux it would still take me a long time to use my modem in linux to download all those files it just makes no sense to do so, its the only reason I don't use debian Sid , I download knoppix but them to use apt-get update ok I didn't mind download those files put to have to download 250MB of files just to use apt-get on a 56 modem thought vmware just ain't for me, I really don't mine downloading 200MB but to have to download it all in the same day debian no pause on download
yes, it seems smaller then downloading 7 debian cds but , I really don't like to download 100 or more MB with my modem it takes nights and days to do so...

but anyway I am getting offsubject, what downloadable windows compression programs can handle .xdelta,.bz2,.lzma,.rz
iso compresion files? So I can know that I can decompress these in windows before download those iso files to burn to cd? theirs no point in downloading them with no current windows compression program can handle them I would have no way of burning them to a cd with nero which handles burning iso files?

xdelta is a form for patching source code. As sorcerer is a source code based distro and you compile evrything from source it would be bandwitdh and time consuming to re-download all the source to something everytime you wanted to update a program. Xdelta takes care of this by downloading the patch from say version 1.0 to v1.1 instead of re-downloading the entire source tree.

BZ2 is the familar bzip compression used mostly today to just compress the iso image a bit more for downloading.

RZ is another compression utility less used that gives slightly better compression ratios.

I'm not too sure on the lzma but I'm guessing its another tool for compression.

.edit.

winrar will take care of the bz2 files and you really don't need to worry about the xdelta ones until you have a running linux system

one of my questions did not get anwsered is the iso file on the site the same file in the iso.rz format?
Why don't more linux versions like gentoo use iso.rz files?

I would save a lot of space , even linuxISO.org does not use this format for their files why Chose to have them on the net uncompressed when compressing them would help save space for other files etc..?

winrar does not support rz file format!

I am not sure where you got your information but the shareware program called winrar 3.30 does not support rz , it supports the rar,zip,cab,arj,lzh,ace,tar,GZip,uue,bz2,jar,iso formats but not rz format , were you thinking of winzip because I have not checked that one out yet to see if it supports it

In win32 I use this program:

http://www.izsoft.dir.bg/izarc.htm

It can handle a couple of Linux compression formats, including bz2.

Google for lzma gives 7-zip ... which I use and find quite good (it does bzip too). More comments made in your other post.

Oh and Jschiwal makes a good point in one of your other questions ... attempting to compress already compressed files can in fact increase their size!