The “Archive Manager” that is built into Ubuntu (Ubuntu is the only Linux distro that I have tried so far) to handle archive formats has no native support for the .rar format.
Try opening a .rar file with the Archive Manager and you are presented with an error.
Fixing this problem requires installation of an unarchiver for .rar files. This is readily available in the repositories in two packages – unrar and unrar-free. The unrar package is from RARLAB and the unrar-free is from Gna! which is the free software version of the non-free unrar utility.
Fire up the terminal and issue the command
sudo apt-get install unrar-free
Once the package is installed, Archive Manager should now be able to extract files with the .rar extension.
