BitTornado is one of the best Bittorrent clients out there, but it's so dang ugly! Well, not anymore. Now it uses gtk2! This guide shows you how to get it up and running on your system.
If you've got bittornado installed already from the repos, get rid of it.
Code:
sudo apt-get remove bittornado bittornado-gui
Optionally, I've also removed the default client.
Code:
sudo apt-get remove gnome-btdownload bittorrent
Again, optionally, I've removed wxgtk2.4.
Code:
sudo apt-get remove python-wxgtk2.4 libwxgtk2.4-1
Now you want to install 2.6
Code:
sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.6 libwxgtk2.6-0
Now, down to buisness. Time to download bittornado from http://bittornado.com/download.html . You have two choices. The stable version, and the testing version. The stable version has a bug we'll need to fix... I'll go into that later. The unstable version is what works for me so I'll cover that first.
Unstable Version:
Download the unstable version (BitTornado-0.3.14.tar.gz at the time of this posting) and extract it somewhere in your home directory. Open up a terminal and cd to that location. First, make sure it is running properly for you.
Code:
python btdownloadgui.py
If it segfaults on exit, don't worry. It does that for me too, but everything works perfectly. Now it's time to install.
Code:
sudo python setup.py install
The final step is to add a line to /etc/mailcap.
Code:
sudo gedit /etc/mailcap
add application/x-bittorrent; /usr/bin/btdownloadgui.py %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY" to the end, save and quit. Close any web browsers you have open and re-open them for the changes to take effect.
If you want to associate .torrent files so that when you double-click on them from nautilus, they will be opened by bittornado, that's easy.
Open up nautilus and go to where you have saved a .torrent file. Right-click on it and select properties. Select the "open with" tab and click the "add" button. Click the arrow next to "use a custom command" and in the box, type "btdownloadgui.py" without the quotes. Click "add" and you're done.
Stable version:
Now I'll cover the stable version. I couldn't get this version to connect to ANY trackers, but perhaps others will have better luck. As with the unstable version, download it (BitTornado-0.3.7.tar.gz at the time of this posting) and extract it somewhere in your home directory. Open up a terminal and cd to that location. First, check to see sure how it runs.
Code:
python btdownloadgui.py
...which should output:
Code:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "btdownloadgui.py", line 29, in ?
from BitTornado.ConfigReader import configReader
File "/home/arktis/src/BitTornado-CVS/BitTornado/ConfigReader.py", line 40, in ?
_CHECKINGCOLOR = ColorToHex(wxSystemSettings_GetColour(wxSYS_COLOUR_3DSHADOW))
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.6-gtk2-unicode/wx/_misc.py", line 187, in SystemSettings_GetColour
return _misc_.SystemSettings_GetColour(*args, **kwargs)
wx._core.PyNoAppError: The wx.App object must be created first!
Holy crap! That's an ugly error message, isn't it? We need to fix that, don't we? To do this, you need to change to the BitTornado subfolder and open a file for editing.
Code:
cd BitTornado
gedit ConfigReader.py
Go down to lines 40 and 41 (turn on the showing of line numbers from your preferences if you need to). The lines should look like this:
_CHECKINGCOLOR = ColorToHex(wxSystemSettings_GetColour(wxSYS_COLOUR _3DSHADOW))
_DOWNLOADCOLOR = ColorToHex(wxSystemSettings_GetColour(wxSYS_COLOUR _ACTIVECAPTION))
Change them to this:
_CHECKINGCOLOR = ColorToHex(wxColour(155,156,157))
_DOWNLOADCOLOR = ColorToHex(wxColour(1,1,1))
Save the file and exit. Go up one level back to where you were before.
Now check again to make sure it runs.
Code:
python btdownloadgui.py
From this point on, you can follow the exact same steps I outlined for getting the unstable version to work, starting with the running of setup.py.
Like I said, the stable version won't work for me because it doesn't connect to any trackers and doesn't throw any specific error messages I can use to trace the problem. If anyone has any success in getting it to work, please let me know.
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