Registering WinRAR on a Linux machine in 2020

The recent LGR video prompted me to write about my experience on how I got an official WinRAR installation to run on Ubuntu.

Back in August, I decided to treat myself to something nice to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. After a session of deep introspection, I concluded that it was time to purchase a WinRAR licence. Registering WinRAR was supposedly considered to be a rite of passage in ancient cultures, the turning point where boys became men. I felt that I had finally reached a level of maturity that would permit me to embark in this life changing journey.

The process itself was relatively straightforward. I went over to the official website and placed an order, and they sent me an invoice and a link from which to download the licence key, itself compressed in a RAR archive. I couldn't help but marvel at the website, it aged like fine wine. It is reminiscent of an earlier internet, and I look back fondly to a time where websites used to be much simpler.

You'll notice I also placed an order for the physical CD. I didn't think it would reach its destination, especially since this was in the middle of a global pandemic, but it did arrive eventually. I handled it with great care.

I'm disappointed that it doesn't say "Congratulations, a winrar is you"

I still had two obstacles in front of me. The first being that my laptop doesn't come with a CD drive, and the second being the fact that I'm running Linux. For the first issue, I bought an external DVD drive for 360 MAD (or about $36) that worked out of the box. As for the second one, let's just say that it's called "Win"RAR for a reason. Fortunately I was able to get it to run on Wine. I'm using Wine Staging 5.6 so I can't tell if it's going to work with the stable versions. I don't really want to mess with it because it took a lot of tuning to get it to run Starcraft, but I'll update the article if I test it on a stable version.

I couldn't get it to install the 64 bit version because of a Wine misconfiguration. I settled for the 32 bit version and the installation went smoothly. The activation process was even smoother, all I had to do was press "Install WinRAR key", and the installation program automatically loaded it from the CD without asking me to browse all the way over there. 10/10 UX right there.

Perfection

It's worth mentioning that the download section offers a console version of rar that is compatible with Linux. I still got WinRAR because I wanted the authentic experience.

While browsing the website, I also realized that there is a 6.00 version. The CD I got only has 5.91. This means that they already released a new version during the time it took for the CD to be shipped ! Indeed, the changelog indicates that 6.00 was released on December 2020.

And that's the story of how I crossed off one of the many items of my bucket list.

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Writing a fast(er) youtube downloader

Image
As a millenial, I never managed to embrace the streaming culture that's so prevalent nowadays. Having grown up in an era where being offline was the norm, I developed an unhealthy habit of just-in-case data hoarding that I can't seem to shake off. When youtube-dl suddenly started complaining about an "uploader id" error , I decided to take things into my own hands. Understanding the streaming process The recon step consisted of inspecting the HTTP traffic to see what I could find. Sure enough, the network tab showed some interesting requests when filtering by "medias": Opening one of these in a new tab shows a MIME type error. The browser can't play it for some reason and neither could mpv. I downloaded it and ran the file command on it, but it shows up as a data blob: $ file videoplayback.mp4 videoplayback.mp4: data I suspected that there was some encryption going on and that maybe the Youtube video player knows how to decrypt this file. B
Lire la suite

Decrypting .eslock files

Image
I was feeling nostalgic the other day so I decided to take a trip down memory lane by browsing some old entries on my phone. To my surprise, I found a few encrypted files that I don't remember putting there. After trying a few passwords that made sense, it quickly became apparent that a mental dictionary-based brute force approach was not the way to go. I turned to Google in search of answers. The first pages mention an app that can decrypt .eslock files, and while it looked promising, I wasn't sure it would be smart to trust a black box of an app with data that I once deemed private enough to encrypt. I had to find another way. This blog post in particular caught my eye. It states that the password of an encrypted file is hashed with the MD5 algorithm then stored within the file itself ! Since MD5 is considered to be obsolete, surely I would be able to un-hash the password if I were to get my hands on it. With no pointers on how an .eslock file is structured, I figured I&
Lire la suite

My experience with Win by Inwi

Image
In my previous post, I mentioned how I was using a data plan that amounts to 10 DH per gigabyte. Being a relatively light streamer, I can usually get by with 10 gigabytes per month. These days however, I often find myself abusing my data plan for calls and screen sharing and whatnot. This month for example, I spent 250 DH on internet alone. With a monthly spending like that, I realized that I might as well get ADSL or a cheap optical fiber subscription. So why didn't I ? Well, for one, I don't want to get tied down by a monthly subscription. Secondly, I don't want something that requires a heavy installation with all the fees and the time that it implies. And finally, I want to have the option of carrying it with me wherever I want. When I was searching for alternatives, a friend of mine suggested Win by Inwi . I looked into it and it seemed to satisfy my needs of portability and ease of use. In short, you can customize your plan as you wish , handle the paperwork onlin
Lire la suite