Download accelerators for Ubuntu

Question

What are the Download accelerators available for Ubuntu?

I like prozilla, but couldn't find a way to install it using apt or software center.

Answer 1

You can't download a file faster than what the speed of your connection allows.Therefore there's no such thing as a Download Accelerator.However as @llori pointed out "It is not about going faster than your local connection, but about overriding download bandwidth per stream from the server itself. That's why it is an "accelerator"." Thus it doesn't make your connection faster, but let's you download faster from a server that doesn't allow you to dothat.

Gwget

Gwget it's a download manager for the Gnome Desktop . The main features are: Resume: By default, gwget tries to continue any download.

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• Notification: Gwget tries to use the Gnome notification area support, if available. You can close the main window and gwget runs in the background.
• Recursivity: Gwget detects when you put a html, php, asp or a web page dir in the url to download, and ask you to only download certain files (multimedia, only the index, and so on).
• Drag & Drop: You can d&d a url to the main gwget window or the notification area icon to add a new download.
• Firefox Extension: Fireget

Source: http://en.wikipedia.com & http://projects.gnome.org/gwget/

Answer 2

Axel is the true Download accelerator for Ubuntu. It is a command-line based tool (which comes with a gui version which starts the download in a terminal window).

To instal : sudo apt-get install axel axel-kapt

Axel-kapt is the gui-version.

Downloading via axel is as simple as typing axel url on a terminal. Useful flags include :

• -n to control number of simultaneous threads.

• -a for a much simpler download progress bar (akin to wget)

• -o to specify an output file

You can install Download Helper extension in Chrome (which allows axel to take over downloads in chrome).

In Firefox it can be easily used with FlashGot addon as alternative to the default downloader.

I also use it with plowdown as an alternative to jdownloader (automatically downloads files from various websites, automating the browser)

Answer 3

I use jdownloader. It's a very good download manager which even supports various one click file hosters like rapidshare,fileserve etc.

You can download it from here.

Answer 4

While Uri Herrera had a very good explanation for what a download accelerator is, the solution that was pointed out, Gwget, is far from what he described as a download accelerator. Gwget is exactly what its name implies, a GUI on top of wget, the most basic of basic unix download program.

One of the reliable ways to get the job (acceleration) done is to download through multiple threads from a particular server. Some servers restrict download speed by threads, instead of the IP. In such cases, if a server limits your download to 100KB/s, having 6 thread will give you an upper bound of 600KB/s, a very significant boost.

So far the one linux program that does this is Multiget, it's a little bit of a pain to setup with firefox, however. But at least it's easy to install on Ubuntu. Google "Multiget deb" to download the debian package. Then look up on the Multiget documentation to see how to hook it up with flashgot. Good Luck

Answer 5

Firefox extension DownThemAll with parallel download ,resume support.

Answer 6

One download manager available you might want to take a look at is Steadyflow Download Manager. Steadyflow works as a Unity indicator applet so to speak.

• A basic GNOME download manager, supporting all URL protocols known by GIO/GVFS. This includes, among others, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and SMB.

• Pausing, resuming, and restarting downloads upon application restart.

• An application indicator, or a notification area icon for platforms without Ayatana libraries.

• An instant search/filter box.

• Ability to add downloads via the command line and D-Bus, for browser extension writers.

• Notification bubbles upon starting and finishing downloads (can be disabled).

To get Steadyflow, open a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and issue the following comands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sikon/steadyflow

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install steadyflow

Answer 7

I use Uget. Its a simple downloader, and supports resuming. THe latest version of uGet ie v1.8.0 also supports torrents. when you run uGet, it also does very well to detect the presence of a filepath in the clipboard, and asks if you want to start downloading.

Answer 8

You can try out flareGet (a recently released download manager for Linux). It is still in the beta stage but works pretty good. It is multi-threaded and supports up to 32 segments per download for download acceleration. For browser integration you can use flashgot.

Answer 9

Polipo is a local proxy that will sit between your browser and the internet and manage the connections. It is bundled with Tor setups as a way of avoiding the use of a socks proxy but maybe it can be used to optimize your internet connection, if you are technically inclined. If you do use it, it will likely be useful to enable pipelining and proxy pipelining in the Firefox registry (about:config) which will allow multiple connection requests to the server. You can then try to increase the maximum number of requests to 10 or so.

Answer 10

you can install prozilla with this . open your terminal and type this

wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/prozilla/prozilla_1.3.6-9_i386.deb 
sudo dpkg -i prozilla_1.3.6-9_i386.deb 

I support for kget , uget and fatrat.

kget is a pre installed one with kde-plasma but if you wanna get it with ubuntu desktop then you can with

sudo apt-get install kget 

as in the same way uget and fatrat you can install with this command . for example for fatrat

sudo apt-get install fatrat 

hope that helps .