title: extracting and creating ipk files
body: <p>ipk packages are the intallation packages used by opkg.</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to extract the contents of one of them and also create my own ipk.</p>
  
  <p>I've read that I should be able to untar them but that is not true.</p>
  
  <p>I've tried:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-shell prettyprint-override"><code>tar -zxvf mypack.ipk
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I get:</p>
  
  <p><code>zip: stdin: not in gzip format</code></p>
  
  <p>I've also tried:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-sh prettyprint-override"><code>tar -xvf mypack.ipk
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I get:</p>
  
  <p><code>tar: This does not look like a tar archive</code></p>
  
  <p>I've found that most of the information on the internet regarding ipk's are inaccurate.</p>
  
  <p>My ipk was generated by bitbake. I'm having a hard time with bitbake and want to avoid using it.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas on how to extract and how to create ipk files? A simple template with a single package would be useful to have.</p>