Another cli tool that should get more airplay (especially to newbies) is wget. Wget is a command line utility that you can use to download files. It is very feature rich. I always use it to download Knoppix. I see a lot of posts on this forum with problems related to bad downloads. I tend to think that using wget would aleviate some of these problems. If you use the -c option wget can resume lost downloads. Since it is a command line based tool, it has the same remote acess benefits as cdrecord does. Some computers on my lan have larger hard drives than others. When I need to download knoppix, I usually ssh into a computer with a larger drive, copy the http or ftp link to the knoppix image, and paste it into the cli with Konsole. Looks something like this:

wget -c ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pu...3-05-20-EN.iso

This will download the image on the remote machine. I really don't use anything else to download large files except wget. It's great and you'll usually find it on just about every linux system.