i’m a big fan of the transmission bittorrent client, having ditched azureus/vuze some time ago. though i used azureus for a very long time..it was pretty close to being my first bt client, but now it’s time to move on.

the commandline version of transmission (transmissioncli) is decent but doesn’t seem to be as featureful as rtorrent.

basics of transmissioncli:
transmissioncli -o /storage6/rawdownloads -p port# <torrentfile>

basics of rtorrent:
quit = ctrl-q
stop torrent = ctrl-d
remove torrent = ctrl-d, ctrl-d
start torrent = ctrl-s
backspace = add a torrent (use tab for listing)
1-7 = various views

rtorrent i love. both apps should be used with GNU screen. also of note, there seems to be a lot of attention on a bt client called: deluge. it’s cross platform and OSS. i’ll try it out sometime, but for the moment i like transmission/rtorrent.

update 5/25/2010:
i’m running rtorrent on debian lenny right now. it comes with a 0.7.x version of rtorrent. i’ve really wanted to use a newer version like 0.8.x for a while to gain DHT support. i held back for a long time because i saw that installing the newer version requires newer versions of other fairly important packages like the c library and gcc, etc.

and now i’ve done it by messing around with “dpkg -i” to install packages manually. took about 20 minutes or so and at least once i thought i brought disaster upon myself. the system is still running though (luckily). i grabbed the packages from the squeeze-testing repository.

when i first ran rtorrent after the newer package was installed my existing session was messed up. this is a known issue: http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/wiki/LibTorrentKnownIssues#session80

update 5/26/2010:
the path to the example config file for rtorrent (in debian at least) is
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc


make a copy of that to your home directory, but rename it to .rtorrent.rc.