So Fedora 9 has been released upon the masses yesterday. I won’t be able to try it for a while, but I decided to start downloading it now anyways. On the download page I noticed a curious new option of using Jigdo. After reading a bit about Jigdo it looks like it could fit me well. I have, what I consider to be, a fast (5Mbit download) Internet connection, but I don’t like the idea of straining mirror download servers of Free Software projects which usually exist on a volunteer basis (A recent check shows that the main Fedora mirror is indeed overloaded). Plus, my bittorrent download keeps going inactive so I’m currently downloading Fedora 9 with Jigdo.
In Fedora 8, Jigdo was easy to install:
# yum install jigdo
From the jgdo manpage I discovered that the command line client version of jigdo is actually called “jigdo-lite”. Using this client turned out to be as easy as telling it which “.jigdo” file to use:
$ jigdo-lite http://www.muug.mb.ca/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/jigdo/Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.jigdo
Jigdo was nice enough to ask me to enter a path to previous installation media (presumably Fedora) to check for files which can be reused. To my amusement it turned out that the Fedora 7 x86_64 DVD contained no such files while the Fedora 8 x86_64 DVD contained 116 of the 2691 files required by the template.
Resuming jigdo was an interesting process. I canceled the first attempt with Ctrl-C. Then I simply re-ran the original jigdo command and it told me:
The temporary directory `Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir' already exists. Its contents
ARE GOING TO BE DELETED (possibly after having been copied to the
image, if they are of interest for it). If you do not want this
to happen, press Ctrl-C now. Otherwise, press Return to proceed.
This puzzled me because it didn’t say what is the meaning of the files in the *.tmpdir directory. Without knowing that I shouldn’t be expected to assess the importance of the directory and make a decision about deleting it. My initial guess was that it contained everything that jigdo has downloaded in the previous session. I checked the “jigdo” and “jigdo-lite” mangpages but they did not mention resuming. Thankfully, the documentation on the website was more helpful. The Downloading Of The ISO section made it clear that I shouldn’t fear to loose Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir after all. Apparently it simply stores files which have just been downloaded but haven’t been merged into the temporary image (which is called Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmp). I checked that currently Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir is much smaller than Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmp so I feel confident in letting jigdo delete that dir:
$ ls -lah
total 3.9G
drwxrwxr-x 3 plouj plouj 4.0K 2008-05-14 15:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 25 plouj plouj 4.0K 2008-05-14 11:16 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 plouj plouj 314K 2008-05-14 11:30 Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.list
-rw-rw-r-- 1 plouj plouj 3.9G 2008-05-14 15:47 Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmp
drwxrwxr-x 4 plouj plouj 4.0K 2008-05-14 15:47 Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir
-rw-rw-r-- 1 plouj plouj 211K 2008-05-12 13:11 Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.jigdo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 plouj plouj 12M 2008-05-12 11:38 Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.template
-rw-rw-r-- 1 plouj plouj 3.0M 2008-05-14 11:30 jigdo-file-cache.db
$ du -sh Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir
7.5M Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir
Find confirms the same:
$ find Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir -type f
Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir/gulus.usherbrooke.ca/pub/distro/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/lucene-contrib-2.3.0-1jpp.0.fc9.x86_64.rpm
Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir/gulus.usherbrooke.ca/pub/distro/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/libpng-1.2.24-1.fc9.x86_64.rpm
Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir/gulus.usherbrooke.ca/pub/distro/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/lftp-3.6.3-2.fc9.i386.rpm
Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso.tmpdir/www.muug.mb.ca/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/glibc-2.8-3.x86_64.rpm
After I pressed “Return”, jigdo happily resumed downloading my Fedora 9 DVD. Some time later, the download finished successfully and the resulting image passed the SHA1SUM check.
In addition to the resuming confusion I noticed a few other problems with Jigdo. Firstly, it just takes a long time to download and check all the files. It has been running for over 3 hours and at 500KB/s (the average speed I get from good servers) the whole DVD image (3970.8 MB) would have been downloaded by now. Secondly, the name is hard to spell correctly. I’ve gone from “Jingo” to “Jidgo” to “Figdo”.
To be fair, I have to admit that the coolness of what jigdo does in the background outweighs its shortcomings and I am happy with it in the end.
