A Beginners Guide to Bittorrent [Part 2 - Torrent Client]

So the bittorrent client is probably the most familiar part of the torrent network. Many people have used uTorrent or Vuze. These are both good options, but have gotten too big for their britches in my opinion. I would suggest trying a program from a smaller developer.

Deluge

I like Deluge. They are free and cross platform! They are basically what uTorrent used to be years ago. Download the program and install it. I am going to assume that you don't need help installing a program. If you aren't sure how, the rest of this guide is going to be a little more difficult that you probably want to tackle. You can always check the Deluge website for install instructions on your platform.



Next you need to make sure that you have your preferences set up correctly.
Go ahead and run Deluge...

You will be greeted with a very simple interface. Before we start looking for things to download, you need to setup your network correctly.

Open the preferences menu.

The first screen we see is the download configuration options. The best way to set up a torrent download client is with a "complete" and "incomplete" folder.

Open up your file browser and make these two folders where ever you plan to download things.

I made mine inside ~/home/downloads/Torrents/...

Now set these folders in the deluge preferences window.

The other options on this screen allow you to do things like auto add downloads from a folder containing .torrent files. This is not necessary right now.

Open Network

Change the encryption to "Full Stream"

That's all you need to do at the most basic level to get Deluge to work the way we want.

There are other options to explore at your leisure, but I will not get into them here.

You are now done setting up your torrent client!

Lets move on and find some torrents to try out!

A Beginners Guide to Bittorrent [Part 3 - Indexing Sites]