Transmission is a download and upload manager application or technically called a BitTorrent client preinstalled on Ubuntu. It is one among a few Ubuntu default applications with a longest history and never had been replaced with any other along with Firefox and LibreOffice. In this tutorial, we will learn about using Transmission to download a torrent file from the internet by practices and examples. Now let's get going!
(Transmission running and showing a progress of downloading a torrent, other finished downloads and its program identity on the second window)
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Why BitTorrent?
- No server, but Peer To Peer - BitTorrent method is an alternative to standard downloading "click Save As on the web" or also known as HTTP.
- Very fast - Mostly or always faster than standard downloading.
- Very reliable - When download failed, you only need to repeat from the point where it failed, not repeating back from zero percent again.
- Resumable - Pause a download today, resume it next month or next year is okay with torrents.
- Automatic checking - When download finished, you can be sure the file is 100% intact.
- Repairing - If a file you got from standard downloading is corrupted, you can repair it by using torrent.
- Aligned with the community spirit - The free software community (within it there are Ubuntu, Debian and others) always shares ISO images and other large files via torrents. By uploading (seeding) files you downloaded, you are contributing to the whole community and that's a good thing.
- Abundant - Most digital files are available via torrents regardless of copyright and licenses and they can be obtained very easily. Other than GNU/Linux images, there are collections of photos/pictures, movies, audio recordings, books, magazines, software and video games etc.
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Before Downloading
Please consider things below:
1. In general, files you can download via torrent are very large (usually more than 1GB) except a few ones of them so make sure you have enough free disk space before proceeding.
2. Beware of downloading (and automatically sharing) files covered with copyright and/or nonfree licenses. These are known to be subject of dispute and enmity among people. You are responsible to your own decisions.
3. Be careful of your internet bandwidth and surrounding. Downloading a torrent can be very fast and resource demanding to your local network. Stop or close Transmission once a download finished, otherwise you will automatically upload same size you download or more unnoticed (unless you decided to contribute to the community by seeding). Limit download speed and decrease peers if you do this on a public place, let's say, like a cafe, otherwise you might disrupt other people using the same network.
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Let's start the exercise below:
Introducing A Torrent File
Below is an example of two torrent files viewed on Ubuntu. The first one is named mushafabdullahalmatrood_archive.torrent sized around 40KB. This file can be used to download several first chapters of Al Quran recitation in ten MP3 files by total size of 1.6GB. The second one is named ubuntu-24.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent by total size of around 400KB. This file can be used to download Ubuntu operating system by size of 3GB. Please note that the actual files are typically large, but the torrent files are always small. These are actually just a file containing information pointing to the original files to be downloaded and list of tracker servers will be used to proceed the download. This kind of files are called torrent files or simply torrents.
Get a Torrent File
If you don't have a torrent file yet, then you should get it first to proceed. We picked here two examples to exercise:
1. ubuntu-24.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent (400KB)
2. mushafabdullahalmatrood_archive.torrent (40KB)
To get torrent number 1, go to Ubuntu Official Website and pick Alternative Downloads, you will find BitTorrent links available there. This torrent file points to a 6.5GB Ubuntu ISO image file. This is also true for any other GNU/Linux operating systems and beyond.
To get torrent number 2, go to this [Ten Chapters of Quran] Abdullah Almatrood web page, and click TORRENT link. This torrent file points to a 1.6GB archive of MP3 files. This is also true to any other millions of downloadable files available on the Internet Archive.
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Download a Torrent File using Transmission
Example 1: Downloading Ubuntu
1. Run Transmission.
2. Click File -> Open -> Open File will show.
3. Navigate to your file ubuntu-24.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent (400KB) -> Open.
4. Torrent Options will show like the following:
a) the torrent file (ubuntu-24.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent here)
b) the directory to save the actual file (Downloads here)
c) disk space information (12GB free here)
d) list of actual file will be downloaded (Ubuntu Noble Numbat 6.5GB here, checked)
e) Cancel and Open buttons at the bottom.
5. Change the destination directory if you wish (for example, we always save actual ISO files in a secondary hard disk drive).
6. Click Open.
7. Download will start.
Special: in torrents, when downloading you will see number of peers and number of trackers. Peers are people who are currently downloading the same file as yours. Trackers are not a central server (unlike in standard HTTP downloads) but servers that track (note, record) peers who have the same files to let you download from them directly. This is a very simplified explanation. To learn more, please read References section below.
8. Once finished, Transmission will color the progress bar green and show a message "Seeding to x of x connected peers". As a result, you got a Ubuntu 24.04.3 image by 6GB size. Done.
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Example 2: Downloading Al Quran Recitation
1. Redo the Example 1 for 2. mushafabdullahalmatrood_archive.torrent (40KB)
2. Torrent Options will show a slight difference like below:
Contents of this torrent:
a) "mushafabdullahalmatrood" directory
b) "001-alfatiha.mp3" (1MB) up to "010-yunus.mp3" (30MB) files.
c) "001-alfatiha.ogg" up to "010-yunus.ogg" and other types of files.
3. Select which one of the files you want to download. For example, picture above showing we only select one file "Al Fatihah MP3" to be downloaded.
4. Click Open and Transmission will download like explained above. As a result, you got a folder named mushafabdullahalmatrood and in it a file named 001-alfatiha.mp3. Done.
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Limiting Speed and Peers
1. Right-click a running torrent.
2. Select Properties -> Options.
3. Under Speed, tick Limit download speed.
4. Fill in it 100 to limit it by 100 kilobytes per second (KB/s), for example. Please adjust the number wisely. (Note: do the same if you want to limit Upload Speed)
5. Under Peer Connections, change 50 to 3 to limit peers to just three persons, for example. Please adjust the number wisely too.
6. You can limit either one of these two, or both. By doing these, your transfer might become slower, but your burden to the network will become lighter. Done.
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Stopping a Torrent
1. Select a running torrent, either it is downloading or uploading (seeding).
2. Click Pause button.
3. Torrent transfer is stopped until Start button clicked. Done.
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Delete a Torrent
1. Right-click a torrent, whether it is running or already stopped.
2. Remove Torrent (Delete).
4. A message window will show a question "Remove torrent?"
5. Click Remove once again.
6. Torrent removed from Transmission. However, this only deletes the entry, while the saved folder and file are safe and not deleted. Usually, this does not free much disk space.
7. Alternatively, to delete a torrent along with its files, select Delete Files and Remove (Shift+Delete) instead in step 1. Usually, this frees much disk space.
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Viewing Peers
As mentioned above, Peers are People who are currently downloading (or uploading) the same files as yours. You can view list of them like the following.
1. Right-click a running torrent.
2. Select Properties -> Peers.
3. Properties window will show a detailed list of peers of selected torrent:
a) Up: whether peer is doing upload or not to you.
b) Down: whether peer is doing download or not to you.
c) %: percentage of data transfer by this peer.
d) Flags: particular information about methods being used by this peer.
e) Address: IPv6 or IPv4 address of this peer.
f) Client: software being used by this peer to run this torrent. Examples here include Transmission, Deluge and qBitTorrent.
4. Close Properties window. Done.
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Viewing Trackers
Now, how does Transmission find peers? Because there are trackers, special servers on the internet helping us find peers* so we can download the file directly from those peers simultaneously. To view trackers:
1. Right-click a running torrent.
2. Select Properties -> Trackers.
3. Properties window will show a detailed list of trackers of selected torrent:
a) torrent.ubuntu.com is a tracker server provided by The Ubuntu Project for humanity.
b) ipv6.torrent.ubuntu.com is the same but provided for IPv6 users worldwide.
c) First tracker gave us 6 peers, while second one gave us 1 peer.
d) Add, Edit, Remove buttons are useful. Trackers can be added to help ourselves find more trackers (usually to increase peers that in turn can increase download speed) or remove unused one.
There are many other tracker servers in the world.
*) Note: aside from an ability called DHT to do that even without trackers.
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About Transmission
Transmission is a BitTorrent client software that is free software (GNU GPL licensed) and has a long history being chosen and trusted as Ubuntu default download manager. Transmission main purpose is for file sharing, for both peer to peer (P2P) file upload and download via an internet protocol called BitTorrent, and thanks to that, Transmission can be used to download (and upload) in high speed large files like collections of audio recordings, videos, digital books, magazine, documents, photos, software etc. Technically, Transmission is written in C++ with two choices of user interface, GTK and Qt, developed in public at GitHub by the community who invites everyone to join in. Its development is funded by donation and if you want to donate to the project, you can send it to the link in the References section.
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See Also
1. How To Download Ubuntu in Step by Step (Featuring Transmission)
2. History of The Ubuntu Buzz Articles under the tag "Transmission"
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References
1. Transmission's Official Website
2. Donate to Transmission Project
4. Source Code Development Central at GitHub
5. What is BitTorrent? By Wikipedia
6. What is Peer 2 Peer (P2P)? By Wikipedia
This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.