LFS201_RESOURCES.tar.gz

There are two problems here, one of our making, one of yours. The file is not compressed as it contains only compressed files, so some unzipping programs won't recognize it. It should have been named LFS201_RESOURCES.tar (without the .gz). That's our bad. The other problem is a dumb unzip program, other people have not complained so I would try 7zip or another relatively new program (the built in windows zip program is quite defective depending on your windows version)

Furthermore, we should have posted newer files to match the 12/25/2018 release, which I have just done, but the content of the RESOURCES file did not change. The new one is called LFS201_V2018-12-25_RESOURCES.tar as that is the proper file with the correction version number in it (the file contens, are, however, identical.)

Any other windows user can comment on what unzip program they use, but a tar archive should not be a big deal and students seem to deal with them every day. I have a Windows free environment and cannot easily check.

Where can i get the tar file

read the instructions in the first chapter. you will get them from https://linuxfoundation.org/cm/LFS201 using the username and password supplied in the introduction chapter

it is up to you. You can shutdown and reboot the next time or do suspend. Booting is rather fast so saving the state will waste some disk space (=RAM in the VM) but save a little time.