.lzma files require lzma to decompress. This is a file format that has far better compression ratios than bzip2, yet uncompresses far faster. Obtain lzma here: http://tukaani.org/lzma/download Or locally: http://maradns.org/download/non-maradns/lzma-4.27.1.tar.gz Once you have lzma, here is how you decompress tarball.tar.lzma: cat tarball.tar.lzma | lzma d -si -so | tar xvf - Note that lzma compresses far more slowly than bzip2; it is best for files that will be compressed once and uncompressed many times (such as open source tarballs).