Downloading—no matter what operating system you are using—is ubiquitous. If you’ve been on the internet you will have downloaded something at some point: PDFs, pictures, ISOs, movies, music files, streaming videos to name a few. This article will take a detailed look at KGet, a very versatile GUI download manager for the KDE desktop which is easy to use and has plenty of easily configurable options. It isn’t perfect (but the upcoming KDE4 may rectify that) but we’ll go with what we’ve got and put it through it paces.

KGet isn’t the only option available. GNU/Linux is blessed with any number of downloading facilities, many of them on the command line: Aria2, Curl, Wget, Axel, Axel-Kapt (GUI). A quick visit to their man pages (using the man command from your terminal) will reveal their versatility and you will use them according to your specific needs apropos a particular download. However, KGet has the advantage of being integrated with KDE and being very user-friendly.

Getting started

I have not carried out a detailed audit of which distros have KGet as part of their default installation, but if your distro is not one of them it is usually a case of a quick visit to your package manager’s software repositories to rectify the omission. If you wish to see a useful comparison by feature and operating system of various download managers, Wikipedia has a good tabular comparison. The first thing you will see, when you run it for the first time, is that it will offer you the option to integrate itself into Konqueror. Personally, I think that choosing to integrate is best but, if you choose not to, your decision is not set in stone. Open KGet and click on Settings→Configure KGet and you will be presented with a six-tab screen. Click on the Advanced tab and check the box for Use KGet as Downloader Manager for Konqueror and all downloads will be intercepted (figure 1).

Figure 1: Options to integrate KGet with Konqueror

If you prefer, you can add a KGet icon to the toolbar by selecting the Settings drop-down menu and clicking on Configure Toolbars. From there, scroll down and choose Disable KGet as Konqueror Download Manager and, by use of the arrows, move it from Available Actions to Current Actions. The icon is, of course, in toggle mode, so repeatedly clicking on it will disable or enable integration. If you are sticking with your original configuration you can still “opt in” KGet by right-clicking a link and selecting from the actions menu to download with it. The enable/disable function is also available from the right click menu on the Kget icon in the panel.

If you have decided to integrate KGet with Konqueror, two things will happen. First, an icon will be added to the Konqueror toolbar: when you download a file, Kget will intercept the request and Kget will be added to the panel until you decide to quit the application. When it comes to actually downloading a file, that blue icon in the Konqueror toolbar will be very useful; if you click on it, you can do one of two things:

1. You can detach it as a dockable item, place it anywhere on the desktop and you can simply drag a downloadable link (including any file download links in your Bookmarks) onto it and KGet will automatically fire up and start to download
2. If you wish to confirm and monitor progress, just double-click on the big blue icon to view. It is quite a large icon though, so if you think it a bit obtrusive just right-click on it and select Hide Drop Target.

Further configuration

Given the number of file types you will download over a period of time, it makes sense to want a facility which can automatically save files types to predetermined directories. KGet can do that for you too; so, before you initiate an orgy of downloading, set it up to do all the hard work for you, using Konqueror’s View Filter.

Setting up default download folders

First of all, you need to create suitably-named download folders which will be used by KGet. If you don’t, when you try to add a file type and specify the location you will get an error message. (It would be useful to have KGet create those directories automatically.) Open Settings→Configure KGet and choose the Folder tab. In the Extensions dialogue box key in the file type—wildcards are permitted—and then add the default folder directly or by browsing for it. Click Add, Apply and then OK your way out. Do this for all the file types and default folders you’d like to set up and you’re ready to roll. Note that when you start downloading you will see that KGet will still prompt you to save in the pre-selected folder. I would prefer that this all happened seamlessly, but at least this way gives you the option to refuse the default and save elsewhere—to another folder on the hard drive or to an external USB drive or stick. Additionally, if you wish to bypass the default folders you have set up you can also hold down the Shift key and left-click on the link: downloads will proceed to your home directory instead or wherever you decide to save them. You can even set a default download folder for given file types to an external device by specifying the file path to it. Just remember to have the device plugged in! At the end of all this you should see something like that shown in figure 2.

Figure 2: Setting up download folders by file type.jpg

Scheduling downloads

Whether an internet connection is dialup or broadband, KGet’s scheduling facility is well worth having as an indirect way of managing available bandwidth. In its current incarnation KGet does not have a feature for bandwidth throttling (or segmentation and multi-threading) so this feature is welcome as an indirect way to manage affairs—until KDE4 ships it with both these features (as well as bittorent support!).