IMHO RAR is a dying archive format, except in the torrent and related warez world. Why? I don’t know. But what I do know (now) is how to install RAR for linux under Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) and this is it:
Download rarlinux, the version I got was 3.6.0 and I found it here:
http://www.rarlab.com/rar/rarlinux-3.6.0.tar.gz
(you can use ‘wget’ from a linux console to grab it)
ungzip the file:
tar -zxvf rarlinux-3.6.0.tar.gz
Now for some reason when i did this the first time, it didn’t fully unzip and I had to process the tar file again, but on another machine both steps were done with the above command. If you have a rar folder now, then skip the next command, but if you have a new file with the name rarlinux-3.6.0.tar (ie, no .gz ext) then untar it with the following:
tar -xvf rarlinux-3.6.0.tar
then change into the rar directory created, and you only need to copy the ‘rar’ file into your “/user/bin” directory
cd rar
cp rar /user/bin/.
use “rar” at the command line without any options to get an overview of the switches and commands associated with it