If your web browser formats this page incorrectly, try viewing the
page source. In netscape 4, click the view menu, then click page source.

With a slow modem connection, zmodem is the fastest way to download a file.
However, in order to use zmodem, usually we have to first ftp the file
to a shell account on some other computer on the internet, and then zmodem
the file from the shell account to our computer. However, if the file is
very large, we might exceed our disk quota on the shell account. But
we can ftp the file to a named pipe, and then zmodem the named pipe to our
home computer.

Suppose we want to download
ftp://ftp2.corel.com/pub/linux/Graphics9/updates/rpm/libaps-1.0-1568.0.i386.rpm.

We need two scripts. The shell script is like this:
mkfifo p
ulimit -Sp 200
ftp ftp2.corel.com<f&
sleep 4
export ONAME=libaps.gz
cat p|gzip -9|sz -w 2048 -
rm p f

'f' is the ftp script, which is like this:
binary
pwd
cd /pub/linux/Graphics9/updates/rpm
ls
get libaps-1.0-1568.0.i386.rpm p
close
bye

Then we upload the two scripts to the shell account, and run the shell
script, let zmodem receive start on our home computer, and then delete the
shell script after zmodem is finished.

It is probably easier to run the shell script with dot
space, and not worry about if the shell script is executable. ulimit
sets the pipe buffer size to 100K (200 x 512 bytes), and probably is not
needed. sleep waits 4 seconds so we can read error messages from the ftp
script. ONAME is the file name for sz; sz is supposed to pass the file
name to the receiving zmodem, but sz does not know the file name because
sz is reading the data from standard input not a file, so sz gets the file
name from ONAME. gzip is probably not needed because most
downloadable files are already compressed. pwd and
ls are not needed, but pwd and ls provide information which is useful
if the ftp script fails. Note that the ftp script does not provide login
or password; this assumes that $HOME/.netrc is already set
up for automatic logins.

To connect to the internet, you want to use a modem terminal program
like minicom or pcomm, not pppd; because a terminal connection is much
faster than a tcp/ip over ppp connection. If your internet service provider
provides shell accounts, use it. Otherwise, try to find a freenet or
something, where you can call in with a modem terminal program and run
lynx or telnet. Then telnet to a shell account. To telnet from lynx, go
to a url like telnet://example.com. If you do not have any shell accounts,
go to a search engine like google and search for free shell accounts.

It is even faster if you use a dos modem terminal program from dos.