DSL Tips and Tricks :: Running Bittorrent 4.20 (4.20.9 + Python 2.3)

Newer version has multi-tracker support which I needed.
myDSL's one is 3.4.2, very obsolete, single tracker only.

A gcc is needed to compile a few python modules.
This works okay: MyDSL>System>gcc1.dsl.info

Get MyDSL>System>Python2.3 and choose somewhere to put the tarball.
You still need to extract it yourself. The tarball puts all in ./opt by default.
We cd to / first so that everything goes into /opt and not foo/opt:
cd /
tar xzvf /blabla/python2.3.tar.gz
which extracts the python binary into /opt/python/bin

And since the old shortcut in /usr/bin points to python2.2:
rm /usr/bin/python
ln -s /opt/python/bin/python2.3 /usr/bin/python

The bittorrent client needs some modules which myDSL version does not provide, so we get source tarballs from here:
python.twisted: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/
zope.interface: http://www.zope.org/Products/ZopeInterface
pycrypto: http://www.amk.ca/python/code/crypto

For each, extract and do "sudo python setup.py install"
They will be auto installed into /opt/python/lib/python2.3/site-packages
That should do it for python.

Official bittorrent client here:
http://download.bittorrent.com/dl/BitTorrent-4.20.9.tar.gz
(Later versions need python2.4)

Extract and run chmod on the python programs therein to give them execute permission:
chmod +x *.py

Prefix the directory containing BT to your $PATH:
export PATH=/blabla/BitTorrent-4.20.9:$PATH

VERY IMPORTANT: This client saves in ~/Bittorrent Downloads/ and keeps incomplete files in ~/.bittorrent by default and since /home/dsl is on the ramdisk you will run out of free space after a while. And obviously you don't plan to keep the download on a ramdisk!
Recommend: export $HOME /yourharddiskmountpoint/blabla

To start a download, just:
bittorrent-console.py foo.torrent
or:
bittorrent-curses.py foo.torrent
Bittorrent-curses has the mighty progress meter.
Bittorrent-console is text-only.

original here.