Thursday, May 25, 2006
Bittorrent client software
Dug a little bit on reach selection of Bittorrent clients to choose a good one for my Linux box; finally decided that QTorrent will suit me best for the time being. It is written in Python (making it simple to install and very much platform-independent) and UI is detailed while not congested. On the negative side, it appears not to be actively developed since about 2004, so this might be a temporary stop.
Among available alternatives are :
Opera 9 with built-in Torrent client; arguably this could be the most convenient solution except that Opera 9 is still in beta and not very stable; white it works (mostly) when you browse torrent client hangs it in a few hours because of "too many open files";
KTorrent has a lot of promise, but unlike QTorrent it is too actively developed, so it bypassed my old SuSe 9.0 system (KDE 3.1) long, long ago; even much older version 0.9 is still too new for it;
Azureus is Java-based so it can be installed and it works, but it is way too advanced for a regular user like me, with a lot of pop-up notifications, red-blue-green signs, and even automatic updates! Interestingly, this applications serves as an example how well-behaved FOSS Java-based application should be written; it can work both with SUN Java as well as with free GCC-based Java implementations.
UPD(22-March-07). There is an interesting command-line bittorrent client ctorrent. It can be configured under OpenBSD, though to do so I had to use "export LDFLAGS=-lcrypto". Do not forget to also open ports 2106-2706 which it is using by default.
UPD(15-May-07). In fact, ctorrent does not work well, it apparently has some disk access problems, perhaps only if saving torrent with too many files, perhaps only on OpenBSD. In the meantime, Opera 9 is long out of "beta" and though some problems were addressed its torrent client is I think still unusable. At the same time, my prediction above on QTorrent materialized : now most trackers refuse to talk to it citing too old version of protocol. So, I am back to using Azureus, which appeared to be not all that bad, and though I have a new machine now and supposedly may try using KTorrent, I just may stay with Azureus for the time being.
Labels: linux, software review, torrent
