You were right - I pressed the big, obvious, green "DOWNLOAD" button, right next to the name of the archive, and it sent me to the adware. I couldn't tell what it was going to download, since it merely activated another script, with an innocuous name.
The tiny print that was a link to the actual archive was labelled "Direct download Link"
Guess solidfiles is just a bad place to put files to share. Glad I had AVG to catch the sneaks.
And I can't explain why you got the tgz from the green button, with Chrome on Linux, and I got malware with Chrome on Windoze - seems like solidfiles is actually watching the request metadata, and only serving malware where it's likely to be installed.