Linux torrenting with utorrent

I have tried many torrent clients for a while and by feature and ease of usage utorrent wins hands down. Googling would give you many more but in Linux you are stuff you have only a few good options.

1.Azureus

This client gives the same set of features as the windows client but in linux it doesn’t behave well. It sometimes fails to listen to a port if I had killed the earlier one. Not my choice but I beleive there are fans out there.

2.Deluge

A promising one but still miles to go before it reaches the utorrent feature set.

3. rtorrent

A console based client. You either like it or hate it. So the choice is upto you.

4.torrentflux

A php based client. Runs on apache. A goof client but still I doesn’t give you all the features that utorrent provides. I beleive this is more useful if you have multiple users using the same machine.

5. uttorent with wine.

For me this is the solution that worked best for me. Works flawless and I get the best control.

Most of these except torrentflux are geared for desktop usage, however I had a different approach in mind. I have two laptops of which one I would rather keep stationary while the other I carry around. The Microsoft marketing machinery had forced windows vista onto the laptop I recently bought. I am not a linux fanatic but a choosy user who likes to get things done in my own way. Now since I have spend my hard earned dollars in buy the vista I decided to use it as the desktop environment. The second laptop would act as my work box to which I will offload all the routine work.

Now in this state I was missing a good torrent client which I could operate remotely which supports DHT, a good disk caching etc. So to all the fellow users who are out there this is approach that worked for me.

1. Install linux on the second laptop (ubuntu I prefer. gentoo is also good, but somehow I got too lazy to compile from portage)

2. Install ssh server, wine, screen, Xvfb in your linux box

3. Download and install utorrent inside wine.

4.Optionally install Xming/X-win32 in your windows pc.

Now you are ready to run the configuration. From the vista box login to the linux machine (putty is a good ssh client)

You need to configure utorrent at the first run. You could do it either by physically logging into the machine or by running Xserver (xming, x-win32) and then connecting remotely. From the shell do:

test$>wine pathtouttorent/utrorrent.exe to run the application.

Remember to enable web-ui in the configuration.

Once you are done with rest of the options close it. The basic idea for the rest of the portion is to keep utorrent running and control it from the web interface. utorrent except a X-server and thats where xvfb comes into picture.

Run the dummy Xserver by executing

test$>Xvfb :1 &

Now you want to make sure that once you logout the application is not terminated. So start a screen session

test$>screen

Now we need to tell the shell to use the dummy display system. To do that

test$>export DISPLAY=:1

Now run utorrent in background

test$>wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/uTorrent/uTorrent.exe &

Now detach the screen session. Press Ctrl-A and then d

From your windows pc go to http://linuxmachineip:portyouhaveconfigure/gui/

Voila! There is your utorrent running in the background.

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