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LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx LinuxVirtualBox.part2.rar LinuxVirtualBox.part3.rar LinuxVirtualBox.part4.rar LinuxVirtualBox.part5.rar Why? Why the propriet
by Tmmrn 13y ago
LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx
LinuxVirtualBox.part2.rar
LinuxVirtualBox.part3.rar
LinuxVirtualBox.part4.rar
LinuxVirtualBox.part5.rar
Why? Why the proprietary rar format? I mean, is there any reason to actually use rar over even "only" xz nowadays or for big downloads, zpaq (lrzip is probably not mainstream enough I guess)? And 1000 megabyte parts? Why?
- JunkDNA 13y agoThis was annoying. Thankfully you run the .sfx file and it stitches all the rars into a single vm. I too would love to know the reasoning.
- blahpro 13y agoAlthough they come from Microsoft, I don't feel enormously comfortable doing this: chmod +x LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx; ./LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx
- xradionut 13y agoI was assuming the built-in NSA access was making people uncomfortable. ;)
- tlrobinson 13y agoEspecially because they're not downloaded over HTTPS...
- simcop2387 13y agofor a lot of self extracting files, take a look at p7zip. It'll usually work on most of them, including some of the funky windows installers. It's also great to pull data off a cd image without mounting, it.
- marshray 13y agoI'd think you could un-rar them manually.
- mortenlarsen 13y agoYes you can. I just tested with unrar.
- crazystone 13y agoWhen I do as above. I got: "bash: ./IE8.WinXP.For.LinuxVirtualBox.sfx: No such file or directory" What can I do?
- tlrobinson 13y agoAnd why bother splitting up large files when most clients can resume partial HTTP requests?
- raverbashing 13y agoWell... Fat32 FSs don't support files > 2GB But yeah, it's silly.
- rbanffy 13y agoSomehow, I imagine they are not hosting these off FAT32 filesystems. Maybe it's IIS that isn't very good with partial HTTP requests... ;-)
- jlgreco 13y agoSeems like a perfect case for distributing with bit-torrent, but I suppose I should not be surprised that they aren't.
- wcfields 13y agoLooks like someone from Microsoft has some old warez scene habits.
- trust-me 13y agoWell there are two types of young nerds - those who use open source and those who use cracked commercial software. It's only natural that the first type doesn't usually end employed by MS.
- MicroAndMacro 13y agoHi Tmmrn. I work on the team that made these available. We originally had these as >3Gb single files and had many requests to reduce the file sizes from people who had failed transfers. It also helps when using sneaker net to setup test environments that are isolated and you need USB sticks to move bits around. We went with RAR because: * It's available on all platforms * No client or 3rd party software needed to extract when using self extracting SFX and EXEs respectively * some degree of built in resiliency and self correction Hope you find them useful. Open to suggestions for improvement too. Follow the team @IEDevChat for updates and feedback.
- Ecio78 13y agoMy suggestion: use 7-zip Open Source, available on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX). You can find also the MSI version that can be deployed via Active Directory GPO http://www.7-zip.org/download.html http://www.7-zip.org/download.html Oh, and you can create self-extracting file too (even though I don't know if you can unpack them on other platforms, never tried, but I should bet you can do it)
- omgtehlion 13y agoPlus, WinRAR can extract these just fine.
- kyrias 13y agoIt's silly to recommend a program when complaining about a format. But yes it would be better if they used zip, which also happens to be integrated in Windows Explorer.
- manojlds 13y ago.7z is a format too, and 7-zip supports that and other common formats like zip and rar.
- Ecio78 13y agoafaik the plain .zip doesn't support multi-part archives and that's what they needed due to the file size. by citing 7-zip (site) I was of course suggesting the .7z file format that is opensource and there are softwares and libraries freely available.
- apalmblad 13y agoA while back (some time in the last year), they had a few of the files zipped up. There were a lot of support requests for help unzipping it. The files had a >4GiB file inside, requiring zip64 extensions. I remember at the time, my out of the box version of unzip on OS X did not support zip64 extensions - I think 6.0 is when support is added. I'm not arguing for rar in particular, just commenting on the difficulties I saw and experienced when using the zip files they provided at one point.
- yuhong 13y agoI remember this problem too (I was reading http://twitter.com/reybango http://twitter.com/reybango at this time). It was when they first launched modern.ie. If I remember correctly, there was also a problem with the initial XP image that led to it being pulled.
- rbanffy 13y ago> Why? Why the proprietary rar format? They want all the assurances that come from software with a corporate face attached to it. They wouldn't subject their users to software made by amateur hobbyists.