Ubuntu Guy

Transmission is a lightweight but yet very powerful bit torrent client that you can use with any operating system besides windows. The cool thing about transmission is that it is full of features (web interface, cli support, encryption support, global and per torrent limits, etc) while it uses minimal system resources – it is written in C – and has a very easy to understand interface.

Since Hardy Heron Transmission is the default bit torrent client for Ubuntu, but at least in the Intrepid release the package is outdated as the 1.34 release is used. While I write this the 1.51 is the latest stable release which is included in the Jaunty Jackalope repositories.

Keeping transmission to the latest stable version

If you want to use the new features of Transmission in your pre Jaunty Ubuntu here is what you have to do. First of all we need to add the new repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. This will tell Ubuntu to look for newer versions of software we have installed there too.

1) To do so we need to open a terminal (Applications-> accesories-> terminal) and give the above command:

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

2) Now add in the end of the text the above lines and save it:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/transmissionbt/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/transmissionbt/ubuntu intrepid main

If you are using Hardy Heron replace intrepid with hardy, or if you are using 9.04 replace it with jaunty.

3) In the terminal give the above commands:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 976b5901365c5ca1
gpg --export --armor 976b5901365c5ca1 | sudo apt-key add -

4) We are almost done. Give this last set of commands in your terminal and your transmission will be upgraded to the latest stable release:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Now we are done. If you are asking yourself if that actually worths the effort, I can assure you that trasmission 1.51 is much better than the 1.34 that Ubuntu 8.10 has and I think that it is also much faster too.

Tags: bit torrent, transmission, ubuntu

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 2:48 am and is filed under Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.