Torrenting on Linux

 Tutorials  1 Response »
Feb 212010
 
rutorrent webUI

rutorrent webUI screenshot (traffic statistics)

As of today, the primary OS on my laptop is Ubuntu and since torrenting is a good way to get open source applications (such as Eclipse), I thought I should definitely invest the time to get a decent torrent client. I’m not saying that Transmission isn’t a good client. I certainly can’t say that since I haven’t used it for more than 5 minutes. I simply lacks umph. It really doesn’t impress me as much as uTorrent does on Windows. So let’s look for an alternative client.

Using uTorrent with Wine is always a popular option, one most Windows to Linux converts happily embrace. Let’s face it, uTorrent is awesome. But I really wanted to embrace Linux which for me meant to stop using the mouse and GUI as much as possible (not that difficult for me) and getting used to native applications rather than applications via Wine. This meant no more uTorrent for torrenting and no more mIRC :( The alternative I settled for came highly recommended by quite a few users. And oh, look at that, it’s terminal based. Of course, I’m talking about rTorrent ;)

I have tried to install rTorrent before and failed. This time around, I had managed to get rTorrent to install and work fine but I couldn’t get a webUI for it to work. So I had dt walk me through the process. I’ll try to document as much of it as possible to help users going through the same issue.

If you want to see a couple of screen shots of the end result before beginning, visit the rutorrent website and check out the screen shots. The best part about it is the tracker based, per torrent and global settings along with the pretty amazing traffic plug-in which gives your multiple (group) views of your traffic statistics. It’s pretty cool ;)

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 Posted by at 9:06 pm  Tagged with: , , , , ,

File list generator v1.1

 Development  No Responses »
Feb 142010
 

On a lazy Sunday afternoon when you’ve got nothing better to do, you either write rather useless scripts or update them. I chose to do the latter.

The file list generation script I wrote some time back was mainly to generate a list of movies I have. When I generated a list of all the HD movies I have on disk, I realized, my list was being ruined by loads of sample files which escape the file filter because they are the same extension as the videos themselves. So I decided to write a simple fix to remove all files with “sample” in it. Of course, this is activated by a command line switch which is by default off. The extension list now ignores all images (pngs, jpgs and bmps) so my file list no longer has any screen shots.

Here’s a couple of sample script calls

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -command “& ‘C:\Users\Karun\My Scripts\filelist.ps1‘” “H:\Movies\HQ”
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -command “& ‘C:\Users\Karun\My Scripts\filelist.ps1‘” “H:\Movies” “true”
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -command “& ‘C:\Users\Karun\My Scripts\filelist.ps1‘” “H:\Movies” “true” “true“

The first one will call on the script and generate an output. The second will do so recursively. The third one will ignore all files with the word “sample” in them. Simple enough? Go get the code and have fun with it!

View Script Source Code | Download Script Source Code

If you’re having trouble executing the script, you should consider signing your PowerShell scripts. Scott Hanselman has written a great post on how to do so. Go read it! You could simply Set-ExecutionPolicy to Unrestricted but then you’d be leaving your system open to attacks. Don’t blame anyone but yourself if you run someone else’s unsafe code and screw something up :) You have been warned :)

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 Posted by at 1:16 pm  Tagged with: , , ,
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