You can find everything in torrents. That’s why I love them. Packed trackers with detailed file descriptions and user comments are a big advantage of BitTorrent over eDonkey and other even- (or odd-) toed ungulates. On Windows, it’s hard to find a better client than uTorrent. But what do you use to download from FreeBSD? Let’s find out.
Transmission. 
I liked the name right away. Trrrransmission. Wow! Sounds like it’ll kick into gear and just go, go, go! It installs three things:
- the client itself
- the transmission daemon
- a web interface for the daemon
I liked it. Simple as a pencil — nothing superfluous. One problem: it doesn’t seed. And it turns out there are no settings to dig into to make it seed :)
Deluge 
Realizing the mistake of choosing software by name, I decided to read some reviews. Deluge was praised very highly. It has more settings, you can attach all sorts of plugins, and sure, there’s no daemon — but that’s not a big deal. It picked up finished downloads, started new ones, but seeding? No dice. I’ll say it again — lots of settings. I combed through everything I could. Tried everything — it just won’t seed. What a curse….
rtorrent 
True BSD folks use rtorrent. Kosher Console-based client, configured via its own rc file, can automatically pick up *.torrent files from a specified directory. No daemon, but with screen that problem is trivially solved. You can hook up one of several existing web interfaces (they require PHP though, so I didn’t bother). What else do you need for complete happiness?
What you need is for it to seed. Damn. Runs on a server without X. Downloads — no complaints. But barely seeds.
KTorrent 
Eventually it was the KDE client’s turn. I’d been putting it off because, as I recalled, when I installed it on a test server (which had X running), it successfully managed to hang the machine. Gritted my teeth and installed it anyway.
Oh! It seeds! Shhhh…. Don’t jinx it…. Alright, let’s download…. here’s a movie.. oh, it crashed… fine, just keep seeding for now…..
But downloading is still necessary — I start adding files. Everything was going fine until, while adding the next download, the machine rebooted. After which the NTFS partition where everything accumulated through the hard work of the previous three BitTorrent laborers turned out to be empty as a student’s fridge %-[=]~~~ Hard to say who’s to blame — most likely the buggy ntfs-3g. (I’ll tell that story separately, about what it cost me in effort.)
In the end — suitable clients ran out. No desire to mess with Azureus on Java. So, the old friend, better than the new four —
uTorrent 
According to the developers, it works great in Wine — and indeed it does. Though the latest version 1.8 is buggy — it can’t find the tracker. So I grabbed whatever I found, version 1.7, dropped in the previously downloaded files — it picked them up, downloads, seeds. Hooray, finally…