The Jigsaw Download, or jigdo for short, is intended to be the primary way to distribute Debian CD images in the future. For now, the system it works, but it's still not very comfortable to use because the download manager app isn't finished.
Because jigdo is better than direct download
Because it's faster! For various reasons, there are far fewer mirrors for CD images than for packages in the Debian distribution. Therefore, if you download from a mirror for CD, it will not only be farther away from you, but also overloaded, especially if you try to download an ISO right after release.
Additionally, some types of images are not available as full .iso because there is not enough space to host them on the servers.
Of course, a "normal" Debian mirror does not contain CD images, so how do you download them with jigdo?
jigdo downloads all the files on the CD/DVD individually. In the next step, all these files are gathered into one big one archive which is an exact copy of the CD/DVD ISO image. However, all this happens in the background.
Let's see how it is done without many commands in the terminal:
You will need to download the application first.
jigdo-0.8.0.tar.xz | 2019-11-19 15:44 | 562K | ||
jigdo-0.8.0.tar.xz.sig | 2019-11-19 15:46 | 566 | ||
jigdo-win-0.8.0.zip | 2019-11-19 15:29 | 1.6M | ||
jigdo-win-0.8.0.zip.sig | 2019-11-19 15:30 | 566 | ||
older-versions / | 2019-11-19 15:43 |
Download jigdo-0.8.0.tar.xz and extract on your desktop, or wherever you wish.
Open a terminal inside the jigdo-0.8.0 folder and run it jigdo-lite
Open its download page Debian in your browser and select the ISO you want. But what we are interested in is not the ISO but the .jigdo file. So to download debian-10.6.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso copy its link debian-10.6.0-amd64-DVD-1.jigdo
Then paste the link to the terminal you have opened:
When it reaches the point Files to scan just press Enter. Then you have to enter the location of the server from where you want to download. Make sure it is in your country (gr) for faster download.
So, as shown in the image below, with the gr command, some links with repositories of the distribution will appear on Greece:
Copy and paste the link to the repository you want and press Enter to start the download.
The jigdo application will start downloading packages contained in the ISO
and saves them in the folder that contains jigdo-lite
Let the process complete, and at the end you will have the ISO in the above folder. The packages that the application will download to create the ISO can be found in the debian-10.6.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso.list file.
and the ISO file