[lug] File Compression Question

[David Morris]

Anyone have a compression program named feather?  I want to be able to
tar and feather my computer at will when I am annoyed at it....

That asside, a serious question:

I have a few directories filled mostly with text files.  Combined, I
have about 800 MB to 900 MB of plain text files that can be compressed
down to 200 MB or so at best.

I was just wondering if LINUX offers any way to to compress files, but
still allow read access to the files...though at a slower rate, of
course.  Sort of like the native compression available NTFS...not the
best compression in the world, but it can at times save a huge amount
of space on the hard disk.

I am running Debian 2.2 (kernel 2.2.18 and 2.4.1 as testing permits),
and am using ext2fs on all relevant partitions.

Any suggestions would be appreciated...As I have 3+ GB free for use
still and it has taken me years to build up these files it is not much
of an issue, but I was just wondering what options are out there in
the linux world if any.  It just always annoys me to have these
uncompressed files always sitting around eating up space.

--David