Re: Fedora ISO distribution with Metalink

[Anthony Bryan]

> 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).

Fedora ISO distribution with Metalink

[Michael A. Peters]

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).