6. Frequently Asked Questions

6.1. [11 Aug 2002]: Can I have two jigdo-lite sessions at the same time in the same directory?

Not at the moment. The two sessions will clash over the tmp/ and jigdo-file-cache.db files. This will being worked on. If you want to run concurrent jigdo-lite sessions, use different working directories.

6.2. [11 Aug 2002]: Why aren't the translations of this HOWTO on LDP?

I've been having trouble getting the translations of this HOWTO submitted to the non-English LDP editors.

The German LDP editor, Marco Budde <Budde@tu-harburg.de> refuses to accept the German translation because it was written in Docbook and not Linuxdoc, even though Docbook is the preferred SGML language for the LDP.

The Portuguese LDP editor, Alfredo Carvalho <ajpc@poli.org>, has completely ignored my submission of the Portuguese translation.

If you care about having LDP documents in these languages, I urge you to write to these editors and ask them to please be more responsible about accepting translated documents. For the time being, you can download these translations from my personal website, http://www.dirac.org/linux/debian/jigdo.

6.3. jigdo takes a bit long to download the files because wget keeps disconnecting and then reconnecting to the FTP server for each file. Is there a way to make it faster?

The download speed can be increased by using an HTTP instead of an FTP server - FTP is not a very efficient protocol for downloading lots of small files. Additionally, you may want to upgrade to the latest version of wget, because that version supports persistent HTTP connections, which results in another slight speed increase.

Unfortunately, even with persistent HTTP connections, the download speed will not be as high as that of a single-file ISO download. Such speeds can only be achieved with HTTP pipelining - the jigdo GUI application will support pipelining.

6.4. How can I make jigdo use a proxy?

This is described on http://debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/ as well as the README of the jigdo-lite tarball.

6.5. What do I do if my jigdo download gets interrupted?

If your download gets interrupted, all you need to do is restart jigdo-lite and hit <ENTER> at all the question prompts. Jigdo-lite will pick up where it left off.

6.6. My jigdo download won't complete because the .jigdo file is broken. When I download a new, fixed .jigdo file, do I need to download all the data over again?

You may find that the .jigdo file you downloaded is broken. It's very uncommon, but it does happen from time to time with moving targets like Debian testing or unstable.

If you find that your .jigdo file is broken, you'll need to download a new .jigdo file (when a fixed one becomes available), but you won't need to download all the ISO data again.

You can use the same loop mounting trick we use when updating an ISO image. The difference is that there's no finished .iso file to start with, but the .iso.tmp file is an ISO image too and can be used to finish the download without having to re-download all the data that was downloaded before the broken .jigdo file caused jigdo-file to halt. Simply loop mount the .iso.tmp file on /mnt and when you re-run jigdo-lite with the fixed .jigdo file, tell jigdo-lite to scan /mnt. Don't forget to rename or move the .iso.tmp file so it doesn't interfere with jigdo-lite which will want to create a new .iso.tmp file.

6.7. Can I use jigdo to download images for DVD?

Absolutely; the process is identical to downloading CD images. The only thing you need to do differently is to download the .jigdo and .template files for DVDs instead of CDs. You can find the DVD .jigdo and .template files at http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/.

Note that you need Linux 2.4 or later to create DVD-sized files. Under Windows, DVD-sized images can't be created at all at the moment because the C++ library of the mingw gcc port doesn't have big file support yet.

6.8. Can I burn the .iso.tmp file to CD?

We haven't tried yet, but it should be possible. You'd probably find some files are filled with "0"'s. If someone tries it, please contact me at <p@dirac.org> and let me know what happened.

But more importantly, why would you WANT to do this? ═ :-)

6.9. Why doesn't jigdo work? It downloads some packages and deletes them. I know it doesn't write them to the iso.tmp file because the file size doesn't change!

Jigdo works just fine - the .iso.tmp file is created at the beginning with its final size, but filled with zero bytes. Later, parts of it are overwritten with the downloaded data.

You can tell that jigdo is making progress by looking at the messages "Found X of the Y files required by the template" that are printed from time to time. The second value "Y" should decrease. When it reaches zero, the download is finished.

6.10. I'm having trouble getting jigdo-easy to work.

See Section 7.1.

6.11. I'm having trouble getting jigdo to download Sarge or Sid.

If you're using Potato or Woody, upgrade to jigdo-lite 0.6.8. Because of a change in Jigdo, the version of jigdo-lite that comes with Woody (rev 0) cannot download Sarge and Sid images. The version that comes with Sarge is sufficient (Section 7.4).

If you're using Sarge or Sid, then you may need some help. Search the archives of the debian-cd mailing list, and if that doesn't solve your problem, you should send them a request for help (Section 7.4).

6.12. Jigdo-lite is too verbose. How can I supress some or all of its messages?

Jigdo-lite uses wget, and wget's output can be quite verbose. If this is unsettling, you can make wget more quiet by adding --non-verbose to the wgetOpts switch in your ~/.jigdo-lite file. If you want wget to print no messages at all, use --quiet in the wgetOpts switch.

6.13. Can I use jigdo on platforms other than Linux?

Certainly. If you're interested in Potato or Woody under Microsoft Windows, old SunOS, HP-UX and IRIX you can use jigdo-easy. See Section 7.1 and Section 7.4.

If you want to download Potato, Woody, Sarge or Sid under Microsoft Windows, jigdo-lite has been ported to that platform and can be downloaded from the main jigdo site (Section 7.4).