Although under Linux you won't find BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and BitComet which are popular under Windows OS, or at least you can't run them under as native binaries, however you can find very good alternatives. Since I am going to write about Ubuntu clients, thus appropriate for the Gnome desktop environment, I am not going to mention the clients which are typical for KDE. Under Gnome there are some popular clients such as Deluge, Transmission, and Azureus. However, Deluge and Azureus have Windows builds, thus for some of you, these clients might not be a brand new thing.

The installation of Deluge is as simple as pasting a command into the Terminal. I would provide you the full graphical way, but it's slower. Open the Terminal (Applications → Accessories → Terminal), then paste this command:

sudo apt-get install deluge-torrent

Provide your authentication password. Confirm with Y when the package manager asks for your confirmation. If everything is OK, then you would have successfully installed the Deluge BitTorrent client.

You can find it under the same 'Internet' sub-menu (Applications → Internet) where it's located the default BitTorrent client. The first run doesn't actually open the client, but the configuration wizard.



The first step of the configuration wizard which actually does something allows you to set the listening port range. You should set something that can be opened within your firewall. Defining the range as a single port is possible.



The next step allows you to set the download path. You can either pick a default directory or you can set the application to ask you with every download.



The next step allows you to chose your upload line speed which automatically sets up some other options based onto the upload line presets. You can fine tune those settings if you have ideas about their functionality. Otherwise, please leave them at their defaults.



The last step from the configuration wizard doesn't have any end-user functionality. It simply allows you to anonymously send some statistics about Deluge's working environment to the development team in order to improve the product. This is completely your choice.



You can start downloading right away, but my recommendation is to wait a little bit till you set something. By default Deluge displays a tray icon, but if you close the window, then the client shuts down. Go to the 'Edit' menu, pick 'Preferences', then the 'Other' tab. Check 'Minimize to tray on close'. That's it. You can download/seed and the client doesn't float around any of your panels. It simply stays into the system tray.



The only thing that you need to do is to click the 'Add' button and start the torrent. Happy download.