Jul 17, 2008  List of Download Managers Available in Ubuntu Linux. Posted on July 17. Install Desktop Data Manager in Ubuntu. Download.deb package from here and install using the following command. Sudo dpkg -i packagename. This is a BETA version of the jigdo GTK+ download manager. In particular, it is NOT yet capable of processing.jigdo files. Spin up Ubuntu VMs on Linux, Mac or Windows. With Multipass you can download, configure, and control Ubuntu Server virtual machines with latest updates preinstalled. Set up a mini-cloud on your Linux, Windows, or macOS system. Learn more about Multipass.

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Introduction

In many VPS environments, it is often the case that you will have a number of small programs that you want to run persistently, whether these be small shell scripts, Node.js apps, or any large-sized packages.

Conventionally, you may write a init script for each of these programs, but this can quickly become time consuming to manage and isn't always particularly transparent for newer users.

Supervisor is a process manager which makes managing a number of long-running programs a trivial task by providing a consistent interface through which they can be monitored and controlled.

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the command line, installing packages, and basic server management.

Installation

Installation of Supervisor on both Ubuntu and Debian is incredibly simple, as prebuilt packages already exist within both distributions' repositories.

As the root user, run the following command to install the Supervisor package:

Once this has completed, the supervisor daemon should already be started, as the prebuilt packages come with an init script that will also ensure the Supervisor is restarted after a system reboot. You can ensure this is the case by running:

Now that we have Supervisor installed, we can look at adding our first programs.

Adding a Program

New programs are given to Supervisor through configuration files, which inform it of the executable to run, any environmental variables, and how output should be handled.

Note: All programs run under Supervisor must be run in a non-daemonising mode (sometimes also called 'foreground mode'). If, by default, the program forks and returns on startup, then you may need to consult the program's manual to find the option to enable this mode, otherwise Supervisor will not be able to properly determine the status of the program.

For the sake of this article, we'll assume we have a shell script we wish to keep persistently running that we have saved at /usr/local/bin/long.sh and looks like the following:

In a practical sense, this script is clearly rather pointless, but it will allow us to cover the fundamentals of Supervisor configuration.

The program configuration files for Supervisor programs are found in the /etc/supervisor/conf.d directory, normally with one program per file and a .conf extension. A simple configuration for our script, saved at /etc/supervisor/conf.d/long_script.conf, would look like so:

We'll look at the significance of each line and some of the tweaks that may be desirable for your program below:

The configuration begins by defining a program with the name 'long_script' and the full path to the program:

The next two lines define the basic automatic behaviour of the script under certain conditions.

The autostart option tells Supervisor that this program should be started when the system boots. Setting this to false will require a manual start command following any system shutdown.

autorestart defines how Supervisor should manage the program in the event it exits and has three options:

• false' tells Supervisor not to ever restart the program after it exits
• 'true' tells Supervisor to always restart the program after it exits
• 'unexpected' tells Supervisor to only restart the program if it exits with an unexpected error code (by default anything other than codes 0 or 2).

The final two lines define the locations of the two main log files for the program. As suggested by the option names, stdout and stderr will be directed to the stdout_logfile and stderr_logfile locations respectively. The specified directory specified must exist before we start the program, as Supervisor will not attempt to create any missing directories.

The configuration we have created here is a minimal reasonable template for a Supervisor program. The documentation lists many more optional configuration options that are available to fine tune how the program is executed.

Once our configuration file is created and saved, we can inform Supervisor of our new program through the supervisorctl command. First we tell Supervisor to look for any new or changed program configurations in the /etc/supervisor/conf.d directory with:

Followed by telling it to enact any changes with:

Any time you make a change to any program configuration file, running the two previous commands will bring the changes into effect.

At this point our program should now be running and we can check this is the case by looking at the output log file:

Success!

Managing Programs

Gm exploded view manuals. Once our programs are running, there will undoubtedly be a time when we want to stop, restart, or see their status. The supervisorctl program, which we first used above, also has an interactive mode through which we can issue commands to control our programs.

To enter the interactive mode, start supervisorctl with no arguments:

When started, supervisorctl will initially print the status and uptime of all programs, followed by showing a command prompt. Entering help will reveal all of the available commands that we can use:

Using the tail command, we can view the most recent entries in the stdout and stderr logs for our program:

Using status we can view again the current execution state of each program after making any changes:

Finally, once we are finished, we can exit supervisorctl with Ctrl-C or by entering quit into the prompt:

And that's it! You've mastered the basics of managing persistent programs through Supervisor and extending this to your own programs should be a relatively simple task. If you have any questions or further advice, be sure to leave it in the comments section.

Download managers

Download managers are gui applications that allow users to manage multiple downloads in a single place, and do things like schedule, pause, resume, control download speed etc. And also download a file in multiple parts to maximise the download speed.

On linux the traditional method to download files is through the use of wget command. It has a simple syntax to download any given url

However wget is a commandline utility and lacks the functionality and features of advanced gui download managers. On windows there are plenty of download managers available like flashget etc. However on Linux there are very few download managers like it, and even those available are not perfect and lack many basic features.

Flareget

A good looking gui download manager. It was earlier open source but the latest release is not. It has a free as well as paid version. Supports downloading files in multiple parts along with other features.

It is quite buggy at the moment in terms of resuming failed downloads. Hopefully would be fixed in future making it a very quick and handy tool for managing downloads.

Download the deb/rpm file directly from the website

Fatrat

Fatrat is a good download manager for linux. It does not support downloading files in multiple parts, but is still better than the rest. It handles crashes very well and can resume download properly. I found it better than flareget and multiget. Download speed can be configured as well.

Project url
http://fatrat.dolezel.info/

On ubuntu install fatrat from synaptic

Multiget

So multiget supports downloading files in multiple parts. The gui is built using wxwidgets which uses gtk on linux. Its is quite stable and handles flaky internet connections quite well.

However it has many drawbacks. If multiget is terminated forcibly (like when the system crashes) then any running downloads fail automatically. Also, it is not being developed actively, so there is little hope to see any improvements. The last update took in 2010.

Project url
http://multiget.sourceforge.net/

On ubuntu install it from synaptic

uget

Uget is a gtk3 based gui download manager for linux. Its available for windows too. Has got a clean and decent user interface and is quite stable. Supports multipart download through the aria2 plugin.

Project url
http://uget.visuex.com/

Kget

Default download manager for KDE desktop. Does not support downloading files in multiple parts. It suffers a major problem. If the internet connection drops for a small time, then the download will stall, and will fail to resume for a very long time even if internet connectivity resumes. Due to this Kget is much of a waste of time.

On ubuntu install from synaptic

JDownloader

JDownloader is a download manager written in pure java and is free and open source. It can pause and resume downloads properly and allows to set bandwidth limits as well. According to its website, JDownloader has a very large user base.

Project url
http://jdownloader.org/

Run the following commands to install on Ubuntu

The jdownloader-installer package contains only a desktop file and a script, which will download and launch the latest JDownloader.

Steadyflow

Steadyflow is a minimal download manager that is based on gtk. Can pause and resume downloads. Available in the ubuntu ppa repository.

Project url
https://launchpad.net/steadyflow

Run the following commands to install on ubuntu

Xtreme Downloader

Xtreme Downloader is another java based gui download manager that can run on any platform with the java 6 runtime installed. It is free and open source and can be downloaded from the following url

It supports download files in multiple parts. Also claims to download files at 5-6 times the normal speed. That is something not possible. But overall as a download managed it works well. It is able to pause/resume downloads properly.

Download the zip file from the website and run the jar file or the xdman.sh script. Make sure you have java runtime (jre) installed.

Prozgui

Prozgui is the gui interface for Prozilla. It is a very basic graphical user interface based on the X windows system and looks very primitive. However runs fine with all features of prozilla. It can download files in multiple parts just like prozilla.

Project url
http://prozgui.sourceforge.net/

Install it from the ppa repository.

Conclusion

JDownloader, Fatrat and Uget are the most reliable download managers. They can download well on poor connections and resume/pause downloads properly. The rest would hopefully improve over time, giving the users more choice.