I was trying to install Ghostscript on my MediaTemple (mt) Linux server but I kept getting the following error:

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

The quick fix around this is to type the following:

gzip -d filename.tar.gz

and then

tar -xf filename.tar

This should extract the file without errors.

Peace