I have a fresh install of Fedora 7 and would like to run a VMware player on it.

I down loaded using Firefox browser’s built-in Download Manager the VMware player. The download manager reported that it will take like 2 hours to complete the 64Mb file. I am not in a hurry so I downloaded the file but half way through the internet connection was somehow unresponsive. I paused the file download hoping to continue it after the connection resumes. After a while the connection came again but when I resumed the download what happened is that it downloaded a 2nd copy of the original file. That means I need to wait again for 2 hours !

This time I remembered some download managers like GetRight® Download Manager which was popular in Windows, so I tried looking for an equivalent in Linux.

I came across with this Download Manager (downman-0.0.5.tar.gz) which I could not seem to compile and install. I looked for another one in sourceforge.net which might be simpler to install Prozilla came as a choice.

“ProZilla is a program that makes multiple connections and downloads a file in multiple parts simultaneously thus enhancing the download speed and downloading the file faster than a download with a single connection. ” — sourceforge.net

I think I found what I am looking for.

Installing Prozilla was very easy and I don’t need to compile & install. By using yum it can be installed directly. Note that root access is needed to install it.

[tony@localhost ~]$ su
Password:
[root@localhost tony]# yum install prozilla

After installing Prozilla.. you may wonder how can I run it? or where was it installed? I looked over on the various menu’s under Applications menu just like what I do normally on Windows but could not find it there. Yeah, yeah, yeah one of the challenges you need to go through in this new environment.

Prozilla was installed under:

/usr/bin

with the name:

proz

After knowing the file to be executed, I went back to my home folder and executed the command to download VMware Player 2.0.

[tony@localhost ~]$ proz http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMware-player-2.0.0-45731.i386.rpm

Here is a screen shots of Prozilla in action.

The download time was cut into half with Prozilla and it did not even reach an hour. What’s good in this was that the downloads can be resumed if ever the internet connection becomes unstable.