Always forget than to untar the command is tar xvf filename?
You can extract any file with a simple command.
$xtract filname
Just add the following code in your .profile file.
The apachesolr module for Drupal provides a first class search engine with faceted search and more. This module needs a solr server to work.
This post explains how you can install the module and a solr server on Mac OS 10.6.