I looked through the recommended Bittorrent clients for Ubuntu trying to find a client that would satisfy me.

I’m the type of guy who likes graphs and status bars and infolists, all the nitty gritty details that go with a torrent… I want to see them! For one it looks really cool, and for second, I feel like I’m doing something cool.

In any case, I sampled of the clients recommended by Ubuntu… and I found them wanting.

Transmission

ubuntu likes tiny little programs that make computers as un-scary as possible. Transmission is this! It looks like the Firefox download window, with a standard progress bar, name of the torrent being downloaded… and that’s about it. Interface wise, it’s really simple… but I like getting all the details about my Torrents, and Transmission just didn’t cut it. Sure, it’s a silly reason to dislike a program… but I wasn’t happy.

Deluge

Deluge is my kind of client! Lots of graphs and bars and stuff! But… it wouldn’t actually RUN any of the torrents. It just sat there, drawing graphs… and the interface was slow and annoying… lets just say Deluge lasted all but 5 minutes between installation and removal. It’s written in Python with GTK bindings, all that cool stuff I like… but it just sucked out of the box.

KTorrent

KTorrent is a "uTorrent clone" for the KDE desktop, and I thought I’d give ‘er a try, as I was always a fan of uTorrent (before it became Mainline, and after!). The interface was slow and ugly (as only KDE can be ugly… sorry, I’m an Ubuntu/Gnome fan for a REASON. KDE scarred me back in Mandrake and Red Hat-land). It’s got all the graphical fiddly bits, but… it didn’t work! It kept complaining about the tracker (which I knew was bunk… the other two bittorrent clients worked, if flaw-fully)… and eventually my sense of good taste took over and I killed KTorrent.

Vuze

Formerly Azureus, written in Java, and my favorite bittorrent client… before the corporate goblins got it and tried to turn it into a personal HD media station program. It’s now iTunes with Bittorrent support, which would be fine… except that, despite my requirement of blinky lights and knobs, I really just want a program that did bittorrent transfers. When Azureus first became Vuze, I had switched to uTorrent, and just never found a client better than that.

Delimma

Now what was I going to do? I’d hacked through all the different clients available, and didn’t find one I liked. I was always a fan of uTorrent, and compared all the other clients to uTorrent…

Why wasn’t I just using uTorrent? I asked myself.

Silly rabbit, I responded. uTorrent is for Windows.

So what? I snapped back before remembering… oh, yeah, Wine!

Wine’ll let me run windows programs under Ubuntu! Snagging the uTorrent installer from the main website (BTW, trying to find a bittorrent client from bittorrent themselves kinda sucks. Maybe the sites were just broken for me, but Bittorrent.com was horridly broken (no stylesheet, just the logo and a test news post?!), and Bittorrent.org is about the protocol, not the client. Just get uTorrent from http://www.utorrent.com/… it’s Bittorrent Mainline without the branding.

Anyway, I install uTorrent, set up a new Wine Drive that points to my home directory, and tell uTorrent to put my torrents in a /Torrent directory. SHAZAM! It looks like uTorrent, is fast like uTorrent, and is slim on resources like uTorrent, but on Ubuntu!

However, the default Wine interface is shockingly ugly. It wasn’t until I opened up uTorrent, though, that I realized why:

It’s not Wine’s fault… its Windows 2000’s and Vista’s/GNOME’s fault!

Windows 2000’s fault for being so utilitarian (as dictated by the graphics hardware at the time)

And Vista’s/GNOME’s fault for getting me used to pretty UIs. I didn’t want heavy greys and sharp edges. I wanted something in the pastels/rounded corners and buttons department.

Luckily, I an article mentioning that Wine can use MSSTYLES files, files the dictate Windows XP’s styles (http://gastly.wordpress.com/2007/06/18/apply-windows-xp-themes-in-wine/), a feature I knew nothing of!

I also found a neat Vista styled theme by Kayeirene, here: (http://kayeirene.deviantart.com/art/VistaPerfection-X4-Msstyles-43412013). It’s highly likely this is a bit of a Real Vista Rip… but as I have a Vista disk with a serial number sticker on my case, I’ll just stick my tongue out at Microsoft if they get hissy. In any case… Subtle Gradients! Round Buttons! And no more Grey!

So, not only do I have my favoritest Bittorrent client in the world, it also no longer looks like I’m working in 1998!

I’m still trying to get the "Fake uTorrent /urs/bin/utorrent script" found here: (http://www.larryni.me.uk/blog/2007/02/24/associate-torrent-files-with-utorrent-running-under-wine/) working. The idea is that it treats uTorrent like a local program… but I can’t get Firefox to send uTorrent a usable path to the temporary file. shrug I can handle downloading the torrent files… drag and drop works with utorrent, so there!