some people have reported issues in saving a file bigger than 4 gig on xp and even 7
IF they use internet explorer and save it to there "Desktop" -- bad idea saving things to the desktop

even if they are using NTFS
but as above if it is a fat32 then the max file size is 4 gig ( minus one bit )

also XP was NEVER !!! able to burn a ISO "image"
you MUST use a third party program to do it

There is a good FREE program called
"CDBurnnerXP " -- yes it sounds fishy BUT it is a real program
https://cdburnerxp.se/en/home

it will burn a dvd , it is a cygwin build of Linux code so it will run on Windows

Wow! That's lots of info, a lot of it for after I get past the iso download problem, some for now.

Hi Shadow_7,
I've also seen mention of a 900MB iso size. That and your numbers for CD iso sizes are well under the 2GB level so it's possible I don't have a download size limit problem.

Hi roy_lt_69,
When I started on this I checked my drive properties and had lots of room left so I think my troubles aren't due to a full disc.

Hi onebuck,
Yes I've been using the MD5 checksum but, since the downloads have all been incomplete, naturally I haven't had any matches.
Your suggestion of the wget approach may be the way to go.
I checked out the Ultimate Guide and see its a great source.

if you are having problems in just downloading the ISO
use the torrent file
and use bittorrent to grab it

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi John VV,

My impression has been that Torrent is great, but just for things that have a lot of users downloading at the same time, that it's then somewhat faster for the individual user and a lot easier on the source. Are there enough people trying for any particular distro at a time to make torrent worthwhile?

I am aware I'll need to get some utility software to burn the iso to a CD (or, apparently also possible, mount it on a USB stick. I'm taking this one step at a time, though.

most main distros have mirrors on fast servers and a LOT of seeders
i have never had , even a little used OS , not download at near my max speed .

also a torrent will AUTO check the md5 hash
there is NO need to recheck it because the torrent software dose that

mind you for mint on a OLD xp computer you will want to use a "lightweight" desktop manager like the xfce version of mint

http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=155
http://torrents.linuxmint.com/torren...it.iso.torrent

Hi John VV,
Interesting that torrent would work for this.

now placing the iso on a dvd or making a usb thumb drive is a different story

now if this old xp computer has only 512 meg of ram ( or 256 meg ) the mint xfce might not work well

but seeing as we do not know if this is a xp computer from 2001 or 2008 ????????
or if it had win98 on it and was upgraded to xp ( a pIII cpu with 128 meg )

If the torrent doesn't work, then I think that getting a really small distro like Puppy (<200MB), then using it to boot into Linux in order to download Mint is something you might want to consider.
Of course you would need to save the Mint iso to your hard disk or write to USB or DVD before exiting/rebooting Puppy.
This way you eliminate Windows altogether, with all it bugs, malware, spyware, etc.
It is a more round about way of doing things.

Who knows you may even like Puppy Linux.

If you do I would recommend the "Precise" version.

+1 to John VV, use torrent to d/l the .iso.

IMO torrents are easier, quite often faster to d/l, and safer than a direct d/l.

Not vista exactly, but IE 6.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/298618

So unless you're using IE6 (which you shouldnt be) there isnt a 2GB problem.

But torrents won't be any faster than your internet connection allows. Some .edu sites direct http downloads don't limit the bandwidth, and plenty of mirrors don't. So I don't see how one would be faster than the other, except in outlying circumstances where the http download is limited.

How is a torrent safer than a direct http download now?

I've seen huge differences in speed between direct d/ls and torrenting the same .iso. That could be in part due to my location- australia has tiny pipes going to the rest of the world. But even for 'local' direct d/ls I tend to get a bit more speed from torrent than from direct d/ls (though if its local, its not a huge difference, something like 2MB/sec for the direct vs 2.2/2.3MB/sec for the torrent).

As far as 'safer', um, I probably should have used a different word. 'Less wastage' maybe? Nothing more fustrating than getting 75% of a 1GB+ .iso then having the conenction fail. Made worse by the small (by world standards) data limits here. At least with torrent, you havent wasted your bandwidth.

Torrents will auto continue, so you avoid fails and starting over from zero. It allows you to down throttle the download so you can do other things while it downloads.

For some torrents when there's a number of peers and they're local to you (perhaps same ISP and region) you can get some blistering speeds that you will never get from far far away. Not so much for torrents of linux isos as number of peers isn't that large that often. New release and first week, you would probably see a difference. Six months in and you're probably the only peer. As long as you don't throttle it, it should be about the same speed in torrent as it would be in http. Using ftp might be a little faster with fewer or smaller headers.

I seem to recall a registry hack for IE back in the day that upped the default timeout (default is like one minute). I changed that to ten minutes and my moms browsing experience was much improved on slow dialup. Until I got her to convert to linux. Windows kept forgetting that it had a wireless device if the signal got below a certain strength. And of course moms like to bury thier computers which attenuates most wireless signals.

You are able to resume downloads from http like this:

You mention one of the reasons I don't bother using bittorrent. As time goes on there are fewer seeders, to the point where there is no benefit using it.

Here is a basic comparison of bittorent and http. Also available is FTP. http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/bittorrent-vs-http.html The person makes a good comparison, but makes the typical mistake of saying that http downloads are unable to be resumed.

Hi All,

It's been slow plodding through things. I'm still trying to get a download manager to work but persistence paid off and, on the fourth try (and the third mirror site), I got the .iso for 32bit Mint (with Mate) to finish and pass the MD5 test.

I used UNetbootin to put the distro on a USB drive and rebooted. Mint seems to have come up. The question is, is there any thing to do to be sure everything is OK? I
don't see any internet access at this point, for example.

Are using eth or wireless