On Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:02:55 -0500, Anthony Bryan wrote:
I just wanted to invite people to try out downloading Fedora ISOs with Metalink. It's an XML format for listing mirrors and checksums along with other information. openSUSE, OpenOffice.org, Arch Linux, and other distributions use it.
It usually results in much faster and more reliable downloads.
aria2 is in Extras and is a great command line client for segmented downloads and BitTorrent, along with Metalink. There are also other GUI clients on Mac, Unix, and Windows.
You can find .metalinks for most Fedora ISOs at http://download.packages.ro/metalink/fedora/
For more info, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink
I'd be interested in any comments people have.
OK, I read most of the fedora parts, started to download aria2, and suddenly thought to try yum install aria2 instead. It worked -- you got it and installed it -- but now I have an old old Very Dumb Question : how do I invoke it?? It doesn't seem to have added a launcher to the main menu under internet, where I'd expected to find it ...
Yes, 'yum install aria2' will work. aria2 is a command line app, and for some reason the command to run it is aria2c, so you'd use:
aria2c URL or aria2c http://download.packages.ro/metalink/fedora/FC-6-i386-DVD_iso.metalink (if you wanted that ISO).
On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 20:32 -0500, Anthony Bryan wrote:
Yes, 'yum install aria2' will work. aria2 is a command line app, and for some reason the command to run it is aria2c, so you'd use:
aria2c URL or aria2c http://download.packages.ro/metalink/fedora/FC-6-i386-DVD_iso.metalink (if you wanted that ISO).
Have you considered using it with Fedora respins?
http://torrent.fedoraunity.org/
I don't know if aria2 is really any faster or not than bt, but if it is, it isn't once the user has to download a very large number of updates because the iso they got from aria2 had not been updated and respun.
If you want aria to catch on, try serving the more recent "respins" with it. Maybe fedoraunity.org could even give links to your metalink page directly, if they like the concept (I can't speak for them).