Ziproxy - Speed up your internet connection

If you have a slow Internet connection, or have been capped, using ziproxy can help speed up browsing by compressing all the html that goes through it. Its easy to setup, all you need is a server that has a fast connection, that you can connect to.

Installation

From your server, either get it from your repository, or download it (Its easy to compile from source) from http://ziproxy.sourceforge.net/.

In ubuntu you can use:

apt-get install ziproxy

Source Install

If its not in your repository, you can install it by downloading the source, then installing its dependancies.
In fiesty, they are:

apt-get install libgif-dev
apt-get install libungif4-dev
apt-get install libjpeg62-dev
apt-get install libpng12-dev

If your missing these libries, you'll get one/more of these error messages:

configure: error: Both libgif and libungif not found.
configure: error: libjpeg not found.
configure: error: libpng not found.

Once installed, it will look for the config file (unless otherwise specified on the command line) here;

/etc/ziproxy/ziproxy.conf 

The easiest way to configure ziproxy, is to create this file. You can now start ziproxy by using:

ziproxy --daemon

When you start it, it will then print out the process id. Please note that if it cant run (for example, it cant use the default port 8080) it will fail silently.

Configuring

There are alot of options you can play with in ziproxy.conf, mostly to do with the compression of various images, but some interesting ones are:

Port=9900
ImageQuality={-15,20,25,0}
UseContentLength=false
ProcessJS=true
ProcessCSS=true
ProcessHTML=true
ProcessHTML_CSS=true
ProcessHTML_JS=true
ProcessHTML_tags=true
ProcessHTML_text=true

Once thats done, change your proxy settings in your browser, and enjoy the speedy surfing!