Sometimes you just want a quick and easy way of downloading  large files.  If you’re like me, you want this with as little of a memory footprint as possible.  Aria2 gives me this ability.  When downloading a torrent for a recent Linux release, I was able to do this with only 5MB of memory being used.  No other download programs can give me this.

What’s nice about aria2 is that you can download the same file from multiple sources (mirrors) and cut your download times with each source.  You can also open multiple pipes to the same download which shortens the time as well.  Let’s take a quick look at what aria2 can do for your downloads.

Downloading with Aria2

For this test I used KDE4 iso’s from OpenSuse.  First, I established a baseline using wget:

wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/opensuse/distribution/12.3-RC2/iso/openSUSE-12.3-KDE-Live-Build0094-x86_64.iso

This took 15 minutes 47 seconds to complete.  The file size is 941MB.  My Internet connection at home has a max download of 10MB and upload of 1MB.

Using aria2, the same file took 10 minutes 32 seconds to complete.  Here is the command I used for this:

aria2c -x2 http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/opensuse/distribution/12.3-RC2/iso/openSUSE-12.3-KDE-Live-Build0094-x86_64.iso

The -x2 in the above command pipelines the download of the ISO into 2 separate threads.  This speeds things up considerably.  Be wary of using too many threads though because many websites out there will throttle you down in speed should you open more than 3-4 threads.

Aria2 supports more protocols than you can shake a stick at including magnet links, bittorrent, metalink and even ftp.  There are many command line flags and options you can use and you can even call aria2 using JSON-RPC and XML-RPC through the web.  All together, aria2 is scalable, flexible and lightweight…there isn’t much it cannot do.  If you’re looking for a lightweight download utility, aria2 has you covered.
ch_fluidH = 1; ch_nump = "3"; ch_client = "devnet"; ch_width = 550; ch_height = "auto"; ch_type = "mpu"; ch_sid = "Chitika Default"; ch_color_site_link = "0000CC"; ch_color_title = "0000CC"; ch_color_border = "FFFFFF"; ch_color_text = "000000"; ch_color_bg = "FFFFFF";

Lightweight Command Line Downloading with Aria2 originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on 3 March, 2013.

Looks like Sony has gone from prosecuting pirates to becoming one.  Only days after the PS4 announcement too.

Over at the KDE Blog, Jonathan Riddell explains that Sony is using a KDE icon in violation of the LGPL3 license under which it is released:

“Nowhere on their website terms of use does it list the LGPL 3 licence it may be copied under (It does say “Any unauthorised use or copying of site content, or use of site content which breaches these Terms (or their spirit) may violate trade mark, copyright and other proprietary rights, and have civil and criminal consequences” although it also says “You must seek and obtain the written consent the operator of this site before creating any link to this site” so I don’t give that page any legal credit.)”

The page in question is a ‘Choose your Vaio‘ webpage on the Sony UK site.

What does one do in cases like this?  It seems that legal action would be a waste of time and money…hopefully, Sony takes note of this and corrects the issue.  They’ve been heavily invested in Linux and Open Source for many years now with their platforms and I’d like to think they’d have learned from their rootkit debacle that you should act quickly to fix things before they blow up on the internet.

Sony Violates the LGPL3 and Steals KDE Icon originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on 22 February, 2013.

Sometimes I read comic books.  I would hope that some of you do as well.  I collected the paper version of comic books when I was a kid (Mostly Superman and Spiderman) and I’ve graduated up to the digital version now.  Comic books in digital format usually use the .cbz or .cbr file extension.  To read these in Windows or on my Linux desktop (I was running XFCE for the year or so) I had to use a specialized application…a comic reader…to do this.

The program I used in Linux was called Comix and it did a great job when I used XFCE.  I know you can also use Evince and I’m sure it does every bit a good job as Comix does.  Both are GTK applications though.  Since I now use KDE 4 on my primary workstation, I wanted to see if there was a Qt application that I could use and I was very disappointed when I didn’t find any.  So, there I was with comics in my Home Directory collecting dust with nothing preferable (read: Qt based) to open them up to read them.  I double clicked on one of them in frustration….and I was surprised when it opened right up.

Okular, the do-it-all reader for KDE4 opens up every comic book I throw at it.  I was saved…rather, my comic collection was saved.  Very handy that the KDE4 devs put in such a great tool to open so many formats.  So if you’re looking for something that can handle your comic collection, look no further than Okular which comes preinstalled with most KDE4 based distributions.

Okular with PDF

Comic Books, Linux and KDE 4 originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on 25 January, 2013.