Quote Originally Posted by docjerry
I used bittorrent to download Knoppix DVD,~4.14 GB. Took >14 hours! with a 1.5 MBPS download speed DSL connection.
The speed depends on many things. Obviously your network connection and how your ISP connects to the rest of the world are big factors. And configuring your router/firewall so that inbound torrent requests are properly routed and honored is extremely important, as BitTorrent is designed to deliberately slow down if people don't configure their system to share the segments that they have already downloaded while they are downloading the rest. Over 14 hours may seem high, but remember that this is a file over 4 gig in size. Back when I did use the mirrors, I sometimes took longer than that to get the 700 meg CD version on a 1.5 DSL connection. I remember getting estimates of over 24 hours to download a CD version from a mirror, and sometimes shopping many mirrors before I could find one that would download the CD version as quickly as you got the DVD version. And even then the ISO ended up corrupted about half of the time! Now I've managed to download the DVD version in about 2 hours (with a 6 gig DSL connection). I have a friend who works at a university with a very high speed pipe, and he managed to download one of the 5.x DVD versions on the day it was released (fewer seeders and more demand) in under 30 minutes! Sure, try FTP if you want for the 5.1.1 CD version. Be sure to check that md5 or sha1 though, as FTP downloads can be subject to frequent problems.

Quote Originally Posted by docjerry
... as you stated, the FTP client steps in and offers to download. Without FireFTP Firefox didn't do that. Thats why I was in mystery at why there was nothing to click on. However, I now see I most likely could have used the info on that final page to put "ftp:// KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso " into the Firefox address bar....
You shouldn't have to do that. Most browsers do indeed give you a link that you can download directly. In fact, I just dusted off an old machine with an older version of Firefox in it and no FireFTP, and that's what happens for me. I used the same URL that you gave above. A page opens labeled Index of ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/pub/mirrors/knoppix/ . Down the left side of the page are a number of different blue links, when I click on the one (about 3 down) marked KNOPPIX_V5.1.0CD-2006-12-30-EN.iso a dialog box opens saying "Opening KNOPPIX_V5.1.0CD-2006-12-30-EN.iso " and giving me the option to save it to disk. You should be able to see a copy of the screen that I see that will allow me to download the ISO file with no cut-and-paste operations here. Maybe there is less support being put in some newer browsers for FTP sites, but I've never seen a browser that wouldn't do this (except when I had FireFTP installed). I would like to have seen your system when it wasn't doing this, but now that you have FireFTP installed it will get involved in opening FTP sites, and I doubt that there is any merit in removing FireFTP just to see how your system was giving you problems.