The virtues of Elinks
15 Oct 2005I had written a post praising Elinks’ capabilities, featuring not only HTTPS and FTP support, but also tabbed browsing and more-than-respectable rendering of table-based pages — heck, it even works well with Gmail, albeit in plain HTML mode. But then I accidentally hit the wrong arrow key. And it ate my post. So now I feel less like saying nice things about it than before.
Nevertheless, impressive considering the limitations of the medium. I used it to download Breezy from iiNet’s FTP (because ISP.net.au still doesn’t have the ISOs), and averaged about 750KB/s — which is about a third again of what I was getting from ISP.net.au, so I think I’ll change the sources.list to that. It’s a shame Telstra’s files.bigpond.com is so useless/HTTP-only/slow to respond to new releases, because I’d love — and I’m sure they’d save some bandwidth/peering expenditure — to be able to get quota-free downloads of this stuff. I probably could have got Breezy from there, albeit via HTTP, albeit in a few days time whenever they get stuff up there (haven’t checked, might be there already, but generally they’re pretty sluggish), but it’s just so much easier this way.
Anyway, I’ve burnt it to CD now (no, Elinks doesn’t do that too) and will hopefully be up and running again soon.
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