Hi Alexandru et al, On Fri, 25 Jan 2002 15:03:25 "Alexandru JIPA" <aljipa@hotmail.com> wrote concerning "Raport": > Dear Flemming, > > Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="Raport BRAHMS pentru intalnire 28 I 2002.rar" > Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 > Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Raport BRAHMS pentru intalnire 28 I 2002.rar" The second part of the (mime) message you sent to the list is RAR [1] archive. RAR is a very _very_ old compression and packaging tool, mostly used in DOS (yes, you know, the old OS where you only had one task - hopeless :-). RAR is not used often on newer OSs. Instead, most people use gzipped tar archives (a.k.a. tar-balls) or, if one is using Windoze or MacOS zipped archives. Further, RAR has a very restrictive lisence, and (I believe) a patent on the compression algorithm, making it non-eligable for distribution with most GNU/Linux distributions. There does exist a utility for GNU/Linux, called unrar [2], but, due to licensing issues, it's not often found in GNU/Linux distributions (Debian GNU/Linux has it, however in the non-free section). So, I highly recommend that you use an archiver commonly used, like TAR or even ZIP. I estimate that only 10% (or less) of the collaboration has the proper utlities to deal with RAR archives. It's a question of speaking the same 'language' - you don't post messages to brahms-l in Romanien, and I don't post messages in Danish, since very few people would understand us. The same thing goes for file formats. That is why formats like RAR, GIF (patent issues), Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and others are not to be sent to the brahms-l list, since only few people will 'understand' it. BTW, Word, PowerPoint and Excel are not really formats, since there's no public specification. The formats that 100% of the collaboration understands are ASCII, Postscript, JPEG, Portable Document Format (PDF) and similar. (Note: Tex/LaTeX, HTML, XML, SGML, and so on, are all ASCII formatted, so there are included too). A SysOp once said to me: If someone sends you a file in a propetary format, write back to them and ask for money to buy the nessecary license. If they decline to do so, shreed the file. Another good archive format is Shar, though less often used. Shar is attractive, since the archives are basically self-extracting scripts. However, you need a Un*x shell on your machine. For Windoze, that can be obtained via Cygwin [3] (which you need to be able to build ROOT anyway). A free (as in beer) evaluation (does what you need) zip archiver for Windoze called WinZip exists [4]. WinZip can unpack tar-balls, but not make them. If you're bound to the Windoze platform (uh?) than you can get Cygwin, which ships with GNU Tar and GNU Gzip. I don't know much about MacOS, but it seems that there's a zip program for MacOS, called SmartZip [5], but I don't think it's free (again, as in beer). On GNU/Linux (and other Un*x) one can use the utility unzip [6] found in most distributions (again in the non-free section of Debian GNU/Linux). However, the use of that tool is depreciated, since it has an restrictive license. Finally, I highly recommend that you do not send large files as attachements to the lists, since that file needs to be sent out to 50+ people, keeping the mail server busy for a very long time indeed. Also, if you happen to read your mail via a modem, the download time for large files can work your phone-bill up to horrendeous heights. Instead, post such files via a web-page (on your homesystem or on rcf2.rhic.bnl.gov), and then people downloaded it at thier leisure. Yours, Christian Holm Christensen ------------------------------------------- Address: Sankt Hansgade 23, 1. th. Phone: (+45) 35 35 96 91 DK-2200 Copenhagen N Cell: (+45) 28 82 16 23 Denmark Office: (+45) 353 25 305 Email: cholm@nbi.dk Web: www.nbi.dk/~cholm [1] http://www.rarsoft.com/ [2] ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/compress/unrar-2.71.tar.gz [3] http://cygwin.com/ [4] http://www.winzip.com [5] http://www.vampiresoft.com/Products/MacOS/SmartZip.html [6] http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/UnZip.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Jan 26 2002 - 11:49:10 EST