Torrents

FAQ

The torrent doesn't start and I can't download the image, what is the matter?

We are using a number of public torrent trackers and also we seed all the time. If there are 0 peers listed at your side then the chances are that your network is blocking the torrent protocol. If you are trying to download it in a work environment then contact your network administrator and ask to download the torrent for you or, alternatively, try to download it at home. Make sure that the torrent protocol and ports are allowed by your ISP. If you have doubts, please, contact your ISP and explain the situation. If you are at home then try with another torrent client. Note that some of our torrents use only UDP protocol so make sure your system has UDP compatibility. Most recent torrents should also have HTTP compatibility.

Notice that we limit the bandwidth from 7AM until 6PM, so if there is one seeder only, the download might be slow during the day. The image would download faster at night (Earth, Bulgaria, Plovdiv, EET GMT+2).

Aren't torrents illegal?

Piracy of copyrighted material is illegal. It is equally illegal to distribute your favorite copyrighted movie via direct download link, torrent, or via a VHS tape. Our images are not copyrighted, they are open source. In summary: torrenting is fine, sharing the content behind the torrent might not be fine, if you don't have the rights to distribute it.

But when I launch a torrent all the rest of the internet stops. My colleague can't visit meme sharing web-sites and even my mobile phone can't access facebook, what about that?

Always limit the maximum bandwidth available for download and upload. Never let a torrent client use all bandwidth, or you may block the whole network.

Where is the direct download link? Some torrents have direct download link?

There is no direct download link. If something has a direct download link it is either quite small and easy to host, or it is a leftover from ancient times.

We used to have direct downloads before but the problem was that a lot of bot programs abused the direct downloads. This triggered hidden download limits and ultimately lead to greater unavailability of the files (despite that we used the best hosting company available – Google). Most customers requested that we use a torrent system instead.

One of the reasons that the downloads can bug even the best hosting company is that they are A LOT and they are BIG and MANY bots download them all the time. As of the beginning of 2018 we seed 122 images, most of them are at least 1.5GB and some are up to 4GB (for comparison, Ubuntu has lesser number of official images and most of them are usually smaller; and they still have torrents since the direct downloads and mirrors experience problems). Now share these 122 links for direct download to the public and expect only customers to download them. Good luck.

On the other hand crawling bots doesn't seem to care that much about torrents (yet). And sometimes people like to seed, thus improving the download speed for everybody else.

I felt miserable downloading the image for what seemed eternity. I am a good person and I want to help others to download it faster. What should I do?

Seed the existing torrents, after you have downloaded them. Thank you, good person.

I really can't download the image, no matter how hard I try. I tried all Linux commands, and even port forwarding. This is the worst experience ever.

Drop us an e-mail at support@olimex.com we would think of way to receive the image that you need.