Metalink

From openSUSE

About Metalinks

Metalink is an open standard that bundles the various ways (FTP/HTTP/BitTorrent) to get files into one format for easier downloads. This makes it good for downloading ISOs; particularly for people who can't use P2P because of restrictions from their ISP or University. It can deliver very fast download speeds since most clients support multiple connections, to multiple mirrors, automatically. In addition, it can do automatic error detection, and correction.

Location of openSUSE metalinks

You can find metalinks for openSUSE images directly on software.opensuse.org. Note the icons.

They are provided by the master download server, which runs MirrorBrain which dynamically generates them. They are also visible on the download server in the same directory where the iso images are found. For instance, in http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/iso/

Using Metalinks; Metalinks Clients

DownThemAll!, a Firefox extension, is probably the easiest way for most people to try out Metalinks.

aria2 (Use aria2 and you won't have checksum errors, packages for openSUSE here) is the recommended Unix command line client, while KGet 2.0 in KDE 4 and wxDownload Fast (All platforms, but no Mac OS binary) (packages for openSUSE here) have a GUI.
Speed Download is available for Mac OS, Retriever (Java) on all platforms, Free Download Manager (GPL), Orbit Downloader, GetRight, and Net Transport on Windows.
There are other clients available for Mac OS, Windows, and Unix.

Example Usage of aria2

To download the 11.1 i386 DVD iso, for instance, all you need to do is copy the link and run aria2c:

Or, if you've got the metalink file downloaded, present on your local disk, you need the -M option. So:

aria2c preallocates space on your filesystem to mimimize file fragmentation, therefore you will see it counting a progress number to 100% before it actually starts to download. It may take a minute or two to allocate space before the download begins for DVD ISOs, but it will save time later.

Checksums

Metalinks can contain full file checksum information which will automatically be verified with aria2, Free Download Manager, GetRight, wxDownload Fast, Orbit, and Speed Download. openSUSE Metalinks also contain repair information to fix errors that may occur during download, but only aria2 0.10.1 and higher currently support this.

If your Metalink program doesn't support this, and you want to be sure that the Metalink transfer did not contain any errors and matches official ISOs, you should compare this number for your own ISO image to checksums listed on download.opensuse.org.

See Download_Help#Checksums for an explanation how to do that.

Should you need to repair a broken download, there are instructions at Download_Help#Repairing_a_Download.