If you want to be able to directly use bzip2 files with tar, you can use the tar patch available from the LFS FTP site. This patch will add the -j option to tar which works the same as the -z option to tar (which can be used for gzip files). Apply the patch by running the following command: patch -Np1 -i ../tar-1.13.patch Install Tar by running the following commands from the toplevel directory: ./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/bin \    --bindir=/bin && make && make install