There is rar and there is zip. Winrar and winzip are just shells/guis for those. When AmigaOS3.1 was new there weren't any of those for windows either, or they were just around the corner.
That's what I'm saying. Use a windows environment from 1992 and you will feel the same kind of frustration as you are now. That's what you have to compare with.
lha will work if you copy it to the right place, name it correctly and use it as it's supposed to.
It has to be in your C directory on your boot partition. It has to be named lha and nothing else. Then you have to be in the same folder as the file you want to extract or give a full path to it for it to work.
Then you have to give the correct arguments for it. If you just enter lha filename.lha nothing will happen except you'll see the list of commands. To extract you have to give the x argument. Syntax is as follows:
> lha x path:to/file.lha path:to/extraced
If you have changed directory (cd) to where the lha file is and you want to extract it in the same location you just type
> lha x file.lha
That's the simplest way.
I wonder if you got it right after you ran the selfextracting lha.run.
When you run that file it will extract these files:
lha_68020
lha_68040
lha_68k
lha_68k.readme
They should be in the same folder as you had the lha.run.
Depending on what CPU you want you need to copy one of them to your C
For a 1200 the safest bet is the lha_68020 file. That needs to be copied to C and renamed to just lha. This can be done easiest with typing this:
> copy lha_68020 C:lha
This copies the file lha_68020 to C and gives it the name lha in one go.
After that you should be able to extract any lha file no matter where you are on your harddrive. Just remember that both the compressed file and all the extracted files will still be there unless you do it in your ram disk since that will be cleared when you reboot. Extracting losts of files just anywhere on your harddrive will clog your file system up and make it difficult to read so keep that in mind. I always extract to ram: because of this.
Take that suggestion and download DirectoryOpus. It's a great file handling program but it's the same there, you need to exctract it before installing and it will need to have lha in C as well to work properly. It doesn't have lha built into it like winrar does for example.
Using an Amiga has a bit of a learning curve for someone who's used to a windows xp system or a mac system for that matter. There are some subtle differences, differences that I myself think are advantages. Probably because I'm used to them. I'm so used to using shell/console that I often do things in a DOS window when I'm in XP. Just feel more comfortable like that.
You will get everything working and you will learn, you just need some patience.
