aria2: file downloading utility

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muggins
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aria2: file downloading utility

#1 Post by muggins »

http://aria2.sourceforge.net/
aria2 is a download utility with resuming and segmented downloading.
Supported protocols are HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/BitTorrent. It also supports Metalink version 3.0. As of 0.10.0 aria2 supports chunk checksum in Metalink: it validates chunk checksums while downloading a file like BitTorrent. This gives safer and more reliable download experience.
I've uploaded this as a .pet here aria2-1.9.0.pet (1675kbytes), or here.

It's a commandline program that can resume broken downloads, and has plenty of other features, including bit-torrent & metalink. to see usage, type aria2c -h in a console.

(N.B.1 The developer has a link here on how to integrate aria2c with the flashgot plugin, for mozilla browsers. It didn't work for me, but if you substituted the following script, save as /usr/bin/aria2c.sh, and give it executable permissions, replacing /root/my-documents with whatever your default download directory is, then, where the link advises Finally, enter "[FOLDER] " in "Argument template" box.[/i], ins ... -1.9.0.pet [/b](303kbytes) ), or from here.
Last edited by muggins on Tue 23 Mar 2010, 02:48, edited 31 times in total.

muggins
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#2 Post by muggins »

i've uploaded the latest release of aria2. i see that the website mentions 3 gui frontends for it as well. the qt based one here:

http://www.aria2fe.com/

compiles easily, but i haven't managed to get it to do anything yet. i suspect it's because the code is calling xterm, and rxvt doesn't like some of the parameters.

muggins
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#3 Post by muggins »

Uploaded the latest release, v 0.11.5
As of 0.10.2, aria2 supports configuration file. It must be placed under ~/.aria2 and must be named as aria2.conf. In each line, there is 1 parameter whose syntax is name=value pair, where name is the long command-line option name without '--' prefix. The lines beginning '#' are treated as comments.

Example:

# sample configuration file for aria2c
file-allocation=prealloc
listen-port=60000
seed-ratio=1.0
max-upload-limit=40K
ftp-pasv=true

Newcrest
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Joined: Sun 04 Mar 2007, 03:19

#4 Post by Newcrest »

I might be sacrilegious here but I cannot see how this is not a backward step from aria which has a good gtk+ gui which shows all your downloads with progress bars and queuing.

It has pause and resume and apart from seeming to lack segmented downloading does everything I want from a download manager

muggins
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#5 Post by muggins »

Yes,

but does the gtk based aria support downloading torrents or metalinks? Also, from the aria2 website:
Unlike Aria, which has GTK+ interface, aria2 provides command-line interface only. But GUI-lessness brings lower resource requirement. The physical memory usage is typically 3MB(normal HTTP/FTP downloads) to 5MB(BitTorrent downloads). CPU usage in BitTorrent with download speed of 500KB/sec is around 7%.
(And if you google for http://aria.rednoah.com/, which was the site for Aria, suspiciously you're re-directed to the aria2 site! Is this a conspiracy or what?)

My own preference in downloaders is, in order:

Commandline: wget, aria2, curl.
Gui: d4x, urlgfe, aria.

But since I virtually never download torrents, and very rarely metalink downloads, 99.9% of my downloading is via wget, which also has pause & resume. (control-c and up arrow for previous command).

Newcrest
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#6 Post by Newcrest »

I use Aria for large files in Firefox via Flashgot. Easy and uses less resouces than Firefox's crappy downloader anyway.
Yes I see the old Aria website redirects to Aria2. Looks like the aria2 people fear competing with Aria. I had better not lose my copy!

There are plenty of options for downloading torrents already. Transmission is getting pretty good. I don't even miss utorrent anymore. (utorrent works in Wine but I did not like it that way)

D4x looks good but the dotpup 2.5.7.1 version that I tried had a bug and did not close properly. I had to always kill it and lose settings so I gave up. Does yours not have that problem?

When I looked at Urlgfe it did not appear to multi-thread either so did not offer anything much over Aria. Did I get that wrong?

Aria2 is great for people who like commandline but that is not me. When I do use commandline I use wget anyway which I see is your first choice.

klu9
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#7 Post by klu9 »

anyone had any experiences with the GUI frontends for Aria2?

muggins
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#8 Post by muggins »

Newcrest:

I suppose two things I liked about urlgfe are that it was tiny, and that it monitored the clipboard for any right-clicked copies of tar.gz, bzip2 etc, (when it was open).

With d4x, I compiled it a few years back, but haven't used it since. I vaguely recall it was slow to shut down, but definitely remember it was very resource hungry starting up.

klu9:

With regards to the gui frontends for aria2, I've only tried aria2fe. As I mentioned above, it compiles easily, but I've had no luck getting it to do anything. I suspect that it's to do with calling an rxvt window, but I never looked at it too long.

aria2fe is intending to use QT4 libraries in future. karia2 is also dependent on QT4, and the third downloader needs perl::tk modules.

muggins
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#9 Post by muggins »

Newcrest,

I just compiled & uploaded the last released version of D4X here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23733

You might want to give it a try as it seems to open & close cleanly...at least for the one file I tried it out on.Image

aria2fe
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Location: Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A.

aria2fe

#10 Post by aria2fe »

Gentlemen;

The recently released version of aria2fe (0.0.4), the GUI front end to aria2, includes a port to Qt 4, and is statically linked against the Qt4 libs so a local machine install of Qt/Qt libs is NO longer required. It also maintains argument compatibility with aria2 versions up to and including 0.11.5. It does require "xterm" however (the grandfather of all X11 terminal emulators). If you are expecting it to run with "rxvt" most likely it will not as the arguments passed to "xterm" (for "xterm" control) are probably not 100% compatible. My suggestion to you (if you would like a stable GUI for aria2) is that you download and install "xterm". Modifying the source for aria2fe and maintaining Qt compatibility can be tricky. By the way, I chose "xterm" for a reason and that is because it ships with every major distro and is not desktop environment dependent.

You can get the latest version of aria2fe here:

http://aria2fe.com/

or here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/aria2fe/

The Management at aria2fe...

muggins
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#11 Post by muggins »

aria2fe,

Thankyou for that clarification about your app.

muggins
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#12 Post by muggins »

Uploaded v0.12.0

muggins
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#13 Post by muggins »

I've uploaded a QT frontend for aria2, aria2fe v0.0.2, here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24525

muggins
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#14 Post by muggins »

Updated to v0.13.1.

muggins
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#15 Post by muggins »

Updated to v0.15.0. Plus added a link on how to integrate aria2c with flashgot.

Newcrest
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#16 Post by Newcrest »

muggins wrote:Plus added a link on how to integrate aria2c with flashgot.
That is really useful. I now actually use aria2c (not into typing). With this I can just click on a link and away we go.

I still prefer the original Aria though for when I want to keep track of files. Since the last version (1.0.0) has the Remaining Time fixed I can't really fault it for keeping track and resuming downloads (all in one nice GUI). The only thing missing is multithreading but aria2c does not do a perfect job there anyway.

I have also used this technique on Aget (which you brought to my attention before). It is fairly simple but for multithreading it is spot on for providing acceleration. It is the only multi-threading Linux downloader that I have found that does the job properly without thrashing your hard disk. (not Prozilla or D4x or DownThemAll or aria2c). It does not matter at very slow speeds but at Adsl2+ speeds it makes a big difference. Now with a simple click I can choose Aget from a download link and it will download up to 10 times faster through congested overseas links.
The Aget pet is here
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 9&start=25

Given that Aget is only 1k, why is it not in Puppy when Axel (which can't resume) is?

muggins
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#17 Post by muggins »

Uploaded v0.15.1. Interesting that the What's New, on http://linux.softpedia.com mentions lowers CPU usage.

amigo
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#18 Post by amigo »

Does anyone know how to get aria2c to exit as soon as it finished downloading a torrent?

muggins
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#19 Post by muggins »

amigo,

not sure about this, but if you email the developer with this query, he's responds to queries.

amigo
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#20 Post by amigo »

Thanks, muggins -I have done so today. I went to the download area because I was sure I had an old version -I notice that the version you offer is also pretty far behind (current aria2-1.1.2):
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=179690

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