Metalink News : 24 Apr 2008

[Ant Bryan]

The MirrorBrain! (openSUSE download redirector)
Ubuntu uses Metalinks for 8.04 release
Metalink Checker does digital signatures
DownThemAll! 1.0.1 Firefox extension is easy
Summer of Metalink? / Google Summer of Code 2008
Celerity 0.0.2 (Downloading Library) Preview Released!
KGet 2 in KDE 4.0.3 update
Retriever, aria2, Speed Download updated
...
The MirrorBrain! (openSUSE download redirector)

The openSUSE download redirector (a.k.a. the MirrorBrain)
automatically redirects clients (per HTTP redirection) to a mirror
server near them. There's already Metalink support now, and some other
very cool features on the way. :)

Want to know what goes on behind such a huge endeavor? Check out the
presentations. It keeps track of 700,000 files in 864 GB, with 15 to
40 million requests per day.

It's used by openSUSE, but it would be great if other projects took a
look at it and tried it out!

http://www.mirrorbrain.org/
http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version

MirrorBrain presentations:
http://www.poeml.de/~poeml/talks/apachecon08-mirrors.pdf
http://www.poeml.de/~poeml/talks/redirector/

...
Ubuntu uses Metalinks for 8.04 release

Canonical started using Metalinks for ISO downloads this week, just in
time for the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron).

Wubi also uses Metalinks for the ISO download.

"Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users
that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows
you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application,
in a simple and safe way."

http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/
http://releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/8.04/
http://wubi-installer.org/

...
Metalink Checker does digital signatures

Metalink Checker (Mac/Unix/Windows, Open Source) is a command line
Python downloader that supports multi-source downloads, chunk
checksums, verifying digital signatures, as well as checking mirrors
listed in a .metalink file. It can also be used as a library.

Try it out with cURL metalinks:
python metalink.py -d -f http://curl.haxx.se/metalink.cgi?curl=tar.gz

http://metalinks.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/metalinks/checker/metalink.py?view=markup

...
DownThemAll! 1.0.1 Firefox extension is easy

"Ladies and gentlemen,
the dTa Team just release version 1.0.1, the first bug correction
release for the 1.0 series.

We corrected several bugs and regression that unfortunately went into
1.0.
Thanks for all the reports we received and that helped us improve
dTa."

http://www.downthemall.net/

...
Summer of Metalink? / Google Summer of Code 2008

A few great Metalink related and non-related projects made it into
Google SoC, including some from our community and friends.
Congratulations!

Looking at our ideas page, a good many of them are already in
progress. There's plenty of things to do, of course. Maybe we'll have
our own Summer of Code...?

http://groups.google.com/group/metalink-discussion/web/gsoc08-ideas

...
Celerity 0.0.2 (Downloading Library) Preview Released!

"Following fast on the heels of its first release, Celerity 0.0.2 is
now available! This release brings many improvements, including multi-
file support and automatic file verification via checksumming."

http://celerius.tuxfamily.org/

...
KGet 2 in KDE 4.0.3 update

KGet 2, part of KDE 4.0.3, supports Metalink. Check the release
announcements for ways to try it out!

http://www.kde.org/

...
Retriever, aria2, Speed Download updated

Halogenware's Retriever 1.09 (Cross Platform, Java) is a download
manager that includes Metalink and BitTorrent support.

aria2 0.13.1+2 was released, an amazing command line downloader. aria2
is also now in the official Cygwin repository!

Speed Download 5.0.2 for Mac OS X is here as well!

http://www.halogenware.com/software/retriever.html
http://aria2.sourceforge.net/
http://www.yazsoft.com/