I tried downloading Knoppix today and the various mirror sites were extremely slow. It would have taken me on the order of twelve hours to get the ISO. Last year, I attempted to get BitTorrent running on my Mac but was unsuccessful. My mistake then was forgetting that my Mac has a firewall set up to block unauthorized ports. I opened up a set of ports (6881-6899) on my Mac. I also set up my Airport base station to forward these ports to my Mac. I downloaded the BitTorrent client, opened up the Knoppix torrent file and away we went. Initial download speeds were slow but still better than what I was getting with the mirror sites. As more peers started joining, my download speed increased. Eventually I got to around 150KB/s. It took me a total of two hours from when I set up my system to getting the files proper. The only downside to using BitTorrent was that other network application’s performance suffered greatly while I was getting the files.