[HOWTO] Password-protected archives in Mageia 3 KDE 64bit

[zugunder]

As it turns out, there is no such a thing as an archive manager with a full support of password setting for KDE. Standard Ark could not open my password-protected zip archive, so couldn’t Xarchiver for XFCE. Gnome’s default File Roller however does this job well, but it requires installation of a couple of dozens of packages, gnome-desktop and Nautilus among them, totting up about 80MB.

The only possible option I have found so far is Peazip, which is not available in the repositories for Mageia 3. If you have Mageia 2 installed, you may try a third-party repository of the Russian Mageia Community, which contains the both Peazip 4.8 and 5 (http://packages.mageialinux.ru/mageia2/).

At the official Peazip website (http://peazip.sourceforge.net/peazip-linux.html) you can find several options for Linux: a ready RPM, Qt portable and GTK portable versions. Unfortunately, neither RPM nor Qt portable could be installed on my 64bit Mageia 3 with KDE due to missing libraries, that apparently (at least judging from the package names) were either already installed on the system or present in the portable version.

Never mind, these two versions are 32 bit, but the latest GTK portable is supposed to be 64 bit. I tried to install it and it was OK without any serious issues, it handles password-protected files well, so that’s what I need. The package is still ~30MB size and it has a GTK GUI, but it is much less than File Roller requires and it looks much better in my opinion.

All the necessary instructions are actually present in a couple of text files within a portable package, so here I only cite them and report what exactly I had to do in order to make it work.

1. First, if neither of Qt options worked for you, go to http://peazip.sourceforge.net/peazip-linux-x86_64.html and download the portable GTK 64bit version of Peazip.
2. Unpack it into the directory of interest (I usually put all non-rpms into /opt/program_name).
3. You may put this location into the path, but if you think you’ll only use KDE for starting it, you can skip this step.
4. Start peazip executable with full path from the terminal and see the first warning – it says it requires canberra-gtk. It looks like it would work without it, but to make sure everything is OK, I installed the corresponding package – lib64canberra-gtk0.
5. Now you may want to put Peazip into KDE menu, so use KDE editor and specify the full path to peazip executable.
6. You may want to integrate Peazip options into KDE. To do so, copy .desktop files from kde4-dolphin//usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/ in Peazip package to /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/, so now you have several Peazip options in context drop-down menus on a desktop and in Dolphin.
7. You do not have Peazip icons yet, so go to http://peazip.sourceforge.net/peazip-linux-x86_64.html and download the package with icons.
8. Extract the folders with icons and copy the icons into corresponding folders (hicolor, according to the size) into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/icon_size_folder. In my case everything from above worked out without restarting of X server or PC – i.e. the icons appeared in the context menus immediately. You only will need to pick the icon manually via Edit Applications in KDE Menu.

So, that’s it.