Xdelta

Xdelta is a revolutionary way of creating and applying binary patches. It can be used to distribute patches for ISO images, instead of downloading a 700MB ISO image of the new version of your favorite distro you can download only a 20MB-40MB patch and apply it using xdelta program to the ISO image of the previous version obtaining thus the new ISO image. By using xdelta you can save both bandwidth and time.

Xdelta is available in antiX. Since antiX-M11 xdelta3 replaces xdelta.

Applying the patch (obtaining the final image from initial file + patch)
Download the patch file to the same folder where you have the file you want to apply the patch to.

xdelta patch patchname

Replace "patchname" with the actual name of the patch (use TAB for name auto-completion). For this command to be successful the file that you apply the patch to has to have the same name as the file for which the patch was built and it has to be in the same folder with the patch. You can use an alternative command: xdelta patch patchname fromfile tofile Where "fromfile" is the name of the file that you apply the patch to, and "tofile" is the name of resultant file.

You can obtain info about the patch by running this command: xdelta info patchname

Creating a patch (for developers and people who want to distribute patches)
xdelta delta fromfile tofile patchname

Creating an ISO file from the CD
In case you don't have an ISO file, you can rip the file from the CD with this command: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=filename.iso Make sure the filename.iso matches the official name and that /dev/cdrom points correctly to your cd/dev device.

Requirements

 * Enough space on harddisk to create the new file, typically 700MB for ISO images.
 * 512MB RAM should be enough in normal cases.

xdelta3
This is the latest stable version of xdelta. If you have this version, the syntax to create and apply the patch is different from xdelta.

Applying the xdelta3 patch (obtaining the final image from initial file + patch)
As xdelta above, but use this syntax. xdelta3 -d -s fromfile patchname.delta tofile

Creating an xdelta3 patch (for developers and people who want to distribute patches)
As xdelta above, but use this syntax.

xdelta3 -e -s fromfile tofile fromisofiletotofile.delta

Links

 * Project home
 * Wikipedia discussion
 * Development blog