How To Compile rTorrent From SVN In Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Author: Stephan Jau
Revision: v1.0
Last Change: Sept 16 2007

Introduction

Torrent is a great way to transfer large files very quickly. However most torrent clients are gui based and have quite some impact on system resources (e.g. Azureus). rTorrent is a lightweight client running from the terminal. Being able to run it in a screen session (also upon boot) makes it ideal to also control it from a remote location.

However the current version provided in the ubuntu repositories is very much outdates. It's version 0.6.x - and features not yet encryption. So your ISP may throttel you bandwidth because of that. The version in the coming Ubuntu release is (currently) v.0.7.4. Also this version is already outdated. The current rTorrent release is v.0.7.8.

Furthermore I was not able to find any complete howto that include all necessary packages to be installed. Hence this little howto here.

How to use, support & help

The rTorrent homepage can be found here.
A basic guide on how to use rTorrent can be found here.
There's an irc support channel on irc.freenode.org #rtorrent and the official support channel is to be found on irc.worldforgenet.org #libtorrent

Assumptions

In this tutorial I will use the defaults user home location and will download all the SVN files there. Specifically I'll use ~/rtorrent for the SVN files. Further you are supposed not to be logged in as root but as a normal user.

1. Get required packages

sudo apt-get install subversion build-essential libtool automake1.9 openssl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libsigc++-2.0-dev libncurses5 libncurses5-dev

Note: Automake must be a newer version than 1.4. So other automake versions work also. I just used 1.9 here because I need it for something else also.

2. Create the rtorrent download folder

mkdir ~/rtorrent

3. Go to the rtorrent download folder

cd ~/rtorrent

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent

4. Then get the latest trunk version

svn co svn://rakshasa.no/libtorrent/trunk

5. Enter the trunk folder

cd trunk

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent/trunk

6. Update rTorrent to the latest SVN version

svn up

7. Go to the libtorrent folder

cd libtorrent

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent/trunk/libtorrent

8. Run the autogen script

./autogen.sh

9. Configure it

./configure

10. Compile libtorrent

make

11. Install libtorrent on the system

sudo make install

12. Go to the rTorrent folder

cd ../rtorrent

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent/trunk/rtorrent

13. Run the autogen script

./autogen.sh

 14. Configure it

./configure

15. Compile rTorrent

make

16. Install rTorrent on the system

sudo make install

17. Run rTorrent

rtorrent

That's it and enjoy!

Update to newest version

If you want to update rTorrent later to the newest version, just start with step (6) from this howto.