The Stray World

Often, we Internet-folks for­get how com­plex most of the Internet’s fea­tures seem to the non-geek. One of the most power­ful fea­tures avail­able for free is Bit­Tor­rent, a way to share (massively large) files such as the Ubuntu installer.

Why do I use the word share and not down­load will be explained after the jump.

The header image of this post is of the pro­gram Trans­mis­sion, a very simple and friendly Bit­Tor­rent cli­ent. Since I really ♥ Ubuntu, I will show you how to down­load Ubuntu via BitTorrent.

1. Go to the Bit­Tor­rent down­loads’ sec­tion of Ubuntu.
2. Choose the installer that fits your com­puter, for mine it would be ubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent. Down­load this file.
3. Open Trans­mis­sion.
4. Click Add and choose the .tor­rent file you just down­loaded. In the Options win­dow, click Add and watch the magic of tech­no­logy deliver the latest stable ver­sion of Ubuntu from the world to your computer.
5. Depend­ing on the num­ber of Seed­ers, you will either receive your file after a quick lunch, or after you get your driver’s license.

Bit­Tor­rent is dif­fer­ent from the usual dir­ect down­loads, because the file you are down­load­ing is being broken down into smal­ler pieces. People from around the world who are upload­ing the chunks they have down­loaded are known as Seed­ers. It there­fore fol­lows that the more Seed­ers for a Bit­Tor­rent file you can find, the faster the down­load will be.

You are now down­load­ing those chunks from these Seed­ers. People who down­load Bit­Tor­rent files from Seed­ers are known as Leech­ers. You are there­fore a Leecher. How­ever, once you have down­loaded any chunk of the file, you your­self can start shar­ing that file, which makes you a Seeder as well.

As long as you aren’t a selfish bas­tard, the set­tings in Trans­mis­sion will seed all files you have down­loaded by default. Thus, you can con­trib­ute back to the com­munity that gave you the file in the first place.

You can check the stat­ist­ics of the file you are down­load­ing in Trans­mis­sion by click­ing on the Prop­er­ties but­ton after choos­ing your selec­ted tor­rent. As you can see above, there are plenty of happy Ubuntu Seed­ers shar­ing the Ubuntu installer. The num­ber of Leech­ers are quite small in rela­tion which means the file will be com­pleted after lunch (or less if the broad­band con­nec­tion holds up).

That’s all there is to it!

You can find other tor­rents of nearly any file you can think of via Bit­Tor­rent tracker sites which are lis­ted here.

My per­sonal favour­ite is isoHunt.com. It’s my only way to watch The Daily Show and The Col­bert Report because the stream­ing ser­vice on their respect­ive sites are dis­agree­ably unstable.

If you want to fiddle with more options, I sug­gest Deluge Bit­Tor­rent Cli­ent which you can install via the Ubuntu Soft­ware Centre or if you are feel­ing adven­tur­ous, install the “unstable” ver­sion via the PPA for Deluge.

C’est tout.

Good hunt­ing and Happy (belated) Inter­na­tional Dar­win Day to you!