Jigdo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jigdo (portmanteau of "Jigsaw" and "download") is a download utility designed for the Debian distribution of GNU/Linux that downloads files from several mirrors in order to build an optical disk image.

A typical application of Jigdo is with its jigdo-file utility. A user that wishes to assemble a disk image downloads a relatively very small file called imagename.jigdo. The jigdo-file utility invoked with this file as an argument then proceeds to fetch additional files from the Internet: imagename.template and a series of .deb files that are listed in the .jigdo file. It then uses the mkisofs utility to build the ISO image.

Jigdo was implemented in Debian in order to reduce the need to have many CD image mirror sites, locations with sufficient disk space and bandwidth to serve numerous 650 MB files (and in more recent times, 4.7 GB files for DVD images). Instead, Jigdo files allow mirrors to carry the regular Debian archive, where packages are not grouped together in image files and instead kept separately where they're also apt-gettable, and still allow for the making of optical disk images.

[edit] External links

• Official homepage
• Downloading Debian CD images with jigdo
• Debian Jigdo mini-HOWTO
• Jigdo Port for Mac OS X (and GUI)