Installing PeaZip in Gentoo Linux

I like the archive file utility PeaZip. A couple of years ago I used an ebuild app-arch/peazip-bin in a local overlay to install the pre-compiled utility in Gentoo Linux. Today I wanted to install PeaZip on my new laptop but neither the ebuild for the binary package nor the ebuild for the source package in third-party overlays was able to install it, not to mention that I could not find an ebuild of either type for the latest version. PeaZip Portable, however, does not require installation, so it’s not difficult to get the latest version of PeaZip running correctly in Gentoo Linux without needing an ebuild. Here’s how I installed the latest version of 64-bit PeaZip Portable in KDE …

1. Download peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2.tar.gz from the PeaZip Portable x86-64 download page and extract it to the directory /home/fitzcarraldo/peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2/ (change ‘fitzcarraldo’ to your own user name, of course).

2. Open a Konsole window and enter the following commands:

# ln -s /home/fitzcarraldo/peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2/peazip /usr/local/bin/peazip
# cp /home/fitzcarraldo/peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2/FreeDesktop_integration/peazip.desktop /usr/share/applications/kde4/
# cp /home/fitzcarraldo/peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2/FreeDesktop_integration/kde4-dolphin/usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/*.desktop /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/

The command given below is an alternative to the last command above, and the menu items would then only appear in the right-click menu of my user account and I would be able to edit them using the KDE 4 Service Menu Editor.

$ cp /home/fitzcarraldo/peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2/FreeDesktop_integration/kde4-dolphin/usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/*.desktop /home/fitzcarraldo/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/

3. Download a nice Peazip PNG icon that you find using Google Images (e.g. the 256×256 PNG icon at http://market.milouz.com/data/icon190.png).

4. Copy the icon to the PeaZip Portable directory:

$ cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Downloads/peazip.png /home/fitzcarraldo/peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2/

5. Use the KDE Menu Editor to specify the icon for the PeaZip menu entry.

6. Finally, use e.g. Gwenview to create a PNG copy of the icon resized to 16×16, and copy it to the icon folder used by the KDE Service Menu:

# cp /home/fitzcarraldo/peazip_portable-5.6.0.LINUX.x86_64.GTK2/peazip16x16.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/peazip.png

That’s it!

Postscript (July 26, 2015): PeaZip 5.7.0 has recently been released, so just replace ‘5.6.0’ with ‘5.7.0’ in the commands listed above, and so on for future versions. Furthermore, see my new post for a tip on how to group the various PeaZip action entries in the right-click menu of KDE file managers (Dolphin and Konqueror).