Ruarí's thoughts

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Posts tagged with "compression"

Faster XZ compression

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 11:07:06 AM

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In my personal opinion XZ/LZMA compression is generally the best all round compression scheme and hence the one I tend to use the most. It produces some of the smallest files and has very fast decompression (not very far off gzip/libz). However whilst decompression speeds are impressive, compression speeds are very slow and that is its biggest downside. Even bzip2 is significantly faster (particularly the fairly common parallelised implementations, pbzip2 or lbzip2). However, there is a way to improve the situation somewhat.

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Alternative options for compressed packages

Monday, September 24, 2012 1:49:24 PM

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Our cross-distro packages are provided in either bzip2 or xz compressed. It would be nice if we could get rid of the bzip2 compressed tar packages and have only the xz compressed ones. The downside however is that some of our users run distros that don't supply any xz decompressor.

Recently I thought of one possible way around this. Checkout the following repacked builds, which are roughly the same size as the official builds but should work on pretty much any distro, without the need for local xz support.

Linux 12.02 Opera final builds:
opera-12.02-1578.i386.linux.tar
opera-12.02-1578.x86_64.linux.tar

Linux 12.10-1605 Opera Next snapshot builds:
opera-next-12.10-1605.i386.linux.tar
opera-next-12.10-1605.x86_64.linux.tar

These are quickly prepared, rough examples based on some ideas I had floating around. We are not currently planning to offer builds like this. For now it is just an interesting alternative method to ponder. wink

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XZ compressed snapshots

Saturday, November 26, 2011 10:15:59 PM

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Recent Opera snapshots are provided in xz compressed tar files. If xz is installed, GNU tar version 1.22 and above will be able to open these packages seamlessly (XZ Utils is pre-installed on many recent distributions or can easily be obtained from their respective repositories). If you have an older version of tar you can still open xz compressed tar files (assuming xz is installed) as follows: 

xzcat opera-11.60-1173.i386.linux.tar.xz | tar x
(Replace "opera-11.60-1173.i386.linux.tar.xz" with the name of the actual Opera package you wish to extract).

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Compression

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 9:38:07 AM

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I have recently been wondering what people think about UNIX compression formats.

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