Axel Home:

See http://axel.alioth.debian.org/ for latest information on axel

Should compile on any decent Linux system. Additionaly, it should compile (and run) on BSD, Solaris, Darwin (Mac OS X) and Win32 (Cygwin) systems.

If the configure script does weird things on your system, please do warn me! I test it on as many machines and OS'es as possible, but still anything can go wrong.

Run the configure script (you can supply some options if you want, try ./configure --help for more info) and then run make. The program should compile then. There are no special requirements for Axel. You can install the program using make install or you can just run it from the current directory. You can copy the axelrc.example file to ~/.axelrc then, if you want to change some of the settings.

Run the program like this:

axel ftp://ftp.nl.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.2/linux-2.2.20.tar.bz2

For a simple single-server-multiple-connection download, or:

axel ftp://ftp.{nl,be,de}.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.2/linux-2.2.20.tar.bz2

If you want to use those three servers for the download. The program can do an automatic search for FTP mirrors as well (filesearching.com), but that's not yet perfect... Just try the -S option. (The line above should at least work with the Bash shell. You can type all the mirrors by hand as well, if you really want to, and/or of necessary...)

Just one other thing you should keep in mind when using this program: Some FTP operators don't like people who use download accelerators. To quote an administrator at Progeny.Com in a mail to me:

Additionally, I should mention that accelerated downloads are discouraged as I consider them abusive.

And he certainly has a point.. Using more than one server at once is a fine solution IMHO, so please use this feature if possible!

Wilmer van der Gaast. wilmer@gaast.net