[SOLVED] andLinux: extracting a tar.bz2

[vicJ]

I was interested in trying out FontForge, and being a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user I decided to install andLinux to run it in. After downloading FontForge as a .tar.bz2, I started Konsole, navigated to the folder and entered:

tar -jxvf fntforge.tar.bz2

I repeatedly get "Cannot open: No such file or directory". I have checked time and again but as far as I can see I have the correct folder and filename. The filename is exactly as it appears in Dolphin, although I did change the filename from the downloaded file (the original name didn't work either).

Can anyone suggest what might be going wrong?
Vic

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome.
Can you verify the file has any size? Is it a blank, empty file?
Use the ls command in a terminal window....in the correct directory.
If the file is in /home/downloads....then cd to that directory.

cd /home/downloads

ls -la

How big is the file? Nevermind what Dolphin tells you, when you use the ls command above, you need to type the name exactly as it is shown in the terminal window. Capital letters and syntax are very important in Linux, so make sure you aren't missing that.

[vicJ]

Thanks for your reply Mike. Still no luck. Here's exactly what I did (in Konsole):

vj@andLinux:~$ cd /home/vj/windows/src
vj@andLinux:~/windows/src$ ls -la
total 2590
drwxr-xr-x 1 vj vj       0 Dec 15 18:54 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 vj vj       0 Dec 16  2010 ..
-r-xr-xr-x 1 vj vj 5304028 Dec 15 16:53 fntforge.tar.bz2
vj@andLinux:~/windows/src$ tar -jxvf fntforge.tar.bz2
tar: bzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
vj@andLinux:~/windows/src$

Does that tell you anything?

Vic

[MikeTbob]

Make sure you have bzip2 installed. That could be the problem.

[vicJ]

Perfect -- that was indeed the problem. And after fixing it using Synaptic I managed to install FontForge the same way and even run it. Now for the tutorials ...

Meanwhile, may I tack on another newbie question? I installed andLinux to recognize my data drive (D:\ in Windows parlance) as my home folder. Is there some way andLinux can read the contents of other logical drives on my hard disk (such as C:\)?

Vic

[MikeTbob]

Linux can read any file system. You probably just need to mount the partition and browse to it.
Is this an NTFS, Fat32?
Open a terminal window and issue this command as root or use sudo.

fisk -l

That's a lowercase L, not a 1. Post your results.

[vicJ]

The partitions of interest are all NTFS. I navigated to /root, but entering fisk always results in "command not found". I googled for "download fisk" on the web but had no luck there.

I don't know anything about sudo. Without an argument, it just gives help information. If I add fisk as an argument, it asks me for a password, but I don't have a password for sudo.

Vic

[MikeTbob]

Oh man, that was a typo. It should be

fdisk -l

I can't believe no one even corrected me, sorry about that.

[vicJ]

fdisk also resulted in "command not found" (from /root) but a search for fdisk in Synaptic yielded 6 or so hits. Of these, I installed three useful looking packages: gnu-fdisk, gpart and kdf.

Entering the first two in the Console still gave "command not found" (see attachment: presumably there is something I have misunderstood). kdf resulted in a series of messages and a window showing disk space information on at least two of my HD partitions. Still, I do not know how to interpret the information, or if I can use it to read files on the partitions.

vic