A good download accelerator for Linux with a GUI is really hard to come by.

Of all the ones I’ve gotten hold of, some were simple download managers with pause/resume options but did not offer any acceleration features, while others were completely command line based.

I recently came across this application SKDownloader, which is a free, although not Open Source, download manager as well as accelerator and is written in Java.

skdownloader

Like any other download accelerator, it has resume support and also gives a good amount of acceleration on downloads by using multiple simultaneous connections.

The features of SKDownloader are:

• Multiple connections to files and download in parts speeding up transfer of files by using more bandwidth.
• Resume support for downloads.
• Redirection of download pages to download files.
• Download over HTTP and FTP.
• Proxy support.
• Scheduling of downloads.
• Firefox integration.
• Automatic updates.

All these features make SKDownloader very handy software for Linux, specially for Ubuntu 9.10. The software is also available for Windows and needs the latest JRE.

For download and more information, visit the SKDownloader homepage ^[1].

Techie Buzz Verdict

Although not open source, this application has a smooth UI and runs without any snaps. Only, it gets a bit frozen at times with too many downloads. Otherwise, being the only download manager available currently with a GUI and this powerful a feature list, SKDownloader is cool software to have. It would have scored better had that big annoying ad not been there. I have never seen a software use more than 24% of the UI space for displaying an ad, that too an ad of its own website!

Techie Buzz Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)