In order to achieve this, you need to download an install Aria2, a lightweight, multi-source download utility. It can be installed from it’s package ‘aria2’ from the universe repositories.
[code language=”bash”]sudo apt-get install aria2[/code]
Now we need to create a file containing the source URLs for the file(s) we need to download. The source/mirror URLs should be separated by a tab or newline. The mirrors can also be used directly as a command line argument, but that would just make things clumsy.
I’m using Lucid Netbook Edition as an example here. My sources.txt contains the following :
`
[code language=”bash”]aria2c -i /path/to/sources.txt -s 12[/code]
The -i argument specifies the input file and -s argument specifies how many connections will be used to simultaneously download the file. Here, we have 12 mirrors for the .iso file, so I used 12 in the argument. According to the aria2c man page, if the value specified in the -s argument (say, N) is less than the number of mirror URLs, the first N URLs will be used and the rest will be used as backup. Otherwise, if the number of mirrors is less, a single source is used more then once, so that N connections can be made.
Aria2 is a wonderful download utility that support Metalinks and BitTorrent other than the usual http, ftp. It can be used to do a whole range of things, but we will keep ourselves limited to the topic at hand. Maybe we will try out those possibilities in an other post.