Xarchiver is the ultimate solution for handling archives on Linux and FreeBSD. It's a Desktop Environment independent archiver front end. All common archive formats are supported, deb and RPM packages are handled without their package managers being installed. Xarchiver only depends on the GTK+ libraries and utilizes various (de)compressor/(un)archiver command-line programs at runtime. Installation of xdg-utils is optional but installing it will allow Xarchiver to support opening more file types directly from inside an archive.
Please read the documentation accessible from the Help menu.
./configure # (run './configure --help' for more details) make
make install
First author of Xarchiver (until 2014) was Giuseppe Torelli, current author of this continuation of the Xfce master branch and maintainer of Xarchiver is Ingo Brückl.