Sunday, November 9, 2008

Making Space

Day 6
I need a copy of the 1983 movie The Outsiders to show to my students. I'm almost positive there's a copy of it in the building somewhere, but just in case, I'd like to download a backup copy in the event that my colleagues fall through on delivering the goods. But how do I download on a computer that only has about 1GB of available space?

First, I started with what I know - Ubuntu Hardy comes with torrent downloading software Transmission. I've already added a few repositories to Synaptic, so I take my chances and search for Transmission. Luck is on my side and it shows up. I mark it for installation and apply changes. All appears well, but the Transmission icon fails to show itself in any of the menus, and it does not load using sudo transmission in the console. If it did install correctly, I'll never know.

Next step - I google torrents for the Eee and find that ktorrent is the most popular. I follow a simple tutorial and it downloads no problem. Looks and acts similar to Transmission, so I'm feeling good. Now to deal with the space restrictions.

I go to "Configure Ktorrent" in the settings menu and change the downloading path to an external 8GB flash drive. Easy fix.

After a quick search on Pirate Bay, I'm all set.


Installing Ktorrent only took a few minutes and changing the download path is an easy hack to combat the Eee's space restrictions.

4 thoughts :

  1. Anonymous said...

    your usage of pirate bay is interesting. why them instead of a different tracker?

  2. Mikulski Family said...

    Thanks for the comment. To be honest, I rarely download anything - especially movies. I prefer streaming sites over downloads - Pandora and FineTune for music, and Hulu for movies and TV.

    I chose Pirate Bay because it's what I know. I used to do general Google searches for torrents but that usually discovered porn and viruses instead of what I was looking for. If you know of a site that you like better than Pirate Bay, I'd appreciate the suggestion!

  3. Anonymous said...

    Besides piratebay.org,

    http://www.demonoid.com (requires registration but one the top torrent sites)
    http://isohunt.com/
    http://darksiderg.com/forums/ (also requires registration)

    are among my favorites. I have been downloading torrents for many years and as long as you read the comments you should not have a problem with viruses and/or porn. Just keep running linux and you will not have the virus problem anyway. Thanks

  4. Unknown said...

    Also you can use torrentpump.com for
    serching torrents