uGet and aria2: the Ultimate Download Manager for Linux

Have you clicked a download link in Firefox and then the connection is lost and you have to download the file again from scratch?  That’s where uGet download manager comes in.

One Download Manager to Rule Them All

uGet is an open source and lightweight download manager available for Linux, BSD, Android, and Windows. With uGet you can pause and resume downloading at any time. It features a download queue, support HTTP, SOCKS4, SOCKS5 proxy for individual downloads. uGet can also integrate with Firefox with the help of a Firefox add-on named FlashGot.

Aria2 is a command line download utility that supports HTTP(S), FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent, and Metalink download. Aria2 can download the same file from multiple sources and with multiple protocols.

Users can add aria2 as a uGet plugin. With these two tools, we can download HTTP(S), FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent, and Metalink resources all in one graphical interface.

Install uGet and aria2 on Linux

Debian/Ubuntu 16.04/14.04/Linux Mint

sudo apt install uget aria2

Fedora

sudo dnf install uget aria2

OpenSUSE

sudo zypper install uget aria2

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S uget aria2

Note that the package name for aria2 is aria2, but the actual executable is aria2c.

After the two packages are installed, open uGet.

By default, uGet only uses curl to download. This is fine for HTTP/FTP download. To download torrent files, you need the aria2 backend support. So in the uGet interface, go to Edit > Settings > Plug-in and set the plug-in matching order to curl + aria2 or aria2 + curl, then click OK to save your settings.

Firefox Integration

Install FlashGot Mass Downloader. When you click a download link in Firefox, you have the option to choose the uGet download manager which will be started if it’s not already running. You can choose other download utilities as well. .

Bencode decoding failed Error

If you are using an old version of aria2, you might see the following error message when downloading torrent files.

bencode decoding failed

The latest version of aria2 (aria2 1.24) fixed this error. To check your aria2 version, run:

aria2c -v

Ubuntu 16.04 repository has aria2 1.19. Arch Linux repository has the latest version.

Install aria2 1.24 in Linux

Go to aria2 Github project page

https://github.com/aria2/aria2/releases/tag/release-1.24.0

and download the latest version. (tar.bz2, tar.gz, or tar.xz). Then open a terminal window and navigate to the download folder. Extract the aria2 archive. The tar xvf command can be used to extract all 3 archive format.

tar xvf aria2-1.24.0.tar.xz

Cd into the directory and run the following command to configure, build and install aria2 1.24.

cd aria2-1.24.0/

.configure

make

sudo make install

Aria2 will be installed at /usr/local/bin/aria2c.

server response 403

If you see this error, that means you are denied access to the resources on the download server. One cause for this is that you visit the download page behind a proxy server, but uGet is not configured to use a proxy server and vice versa.

You can configure each downloads to use or not to use proxy server.

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