Steal This Computer Book 3: What They Wont Tell You about the Internet

Since installing many of these programs may be tricky, we've made no attempt here to tell you how to install or troubleshoot them. Before you install a program, you should visit the program's website (listed with each program) and follow the software publisher's installation instructions.

Uncompressing, Unzipping, Unstuffing, and So On

Many of these programs are compressed; you'll recognize the compressed files by their extensions.

• .zip files are Windows files which may be "unzipped" with Stufflt Expander or WinZip.

• .exe files are program files; double-click them from within Windows to extract them and run the application.

• .sit and .sea files are Macintosh Stufflt files which may be "unstuffed" with Stufflt Expander.

• .gz and .tar are gzipped or tarred Linux files which may be uncompressed with LinZip or tar.

You must expand or uncompress these programs before you can run them. Here's a list of useful tools for that purpose.

Utilities

Programs to expand compressed files.

Windows

• Aladdin Expander Decompress, decode, convert, and access the most popular compression archive formats, including Stufflt (.sit), ZIP (.zip), UUencode (.uu), MacBinary (.bin), BinHex (.hqx), and more. Freeware. (http://www.aladdinsys.com)

• WinZip A straightforward zipping and unzipping utility. Shareware. (http://www.winzip.com)

Macintosh

• Aladdin Expander Decompress, decode, convert, and access the most popular compression archive formats, including Stufflt (.sit), ZIP (.zip), UUencode (.uu), MacBinary (.bin), BinHex (.hqx), and more. Freeware. (http://www.aladdinsys.com)

• Aladdin DropStuff Compress, encrypt, and make self-extracting archives. Shareware. (http://www.aladdinsys.com)

Linux

• LinZip A full-featured compression utility. Shareware. (http://www.linzip.com)

• tar Compress and manipulate tar archives. Freeware.