YuMDaP.net's blog

Currently, the only feature packed Bittorrent client available in Linux is Azureus. Azureus is great but it has a huge downside. Their developers apparently don't know how to make use of Java's and SWT's speed and there are huge memory leaks. On slow systems this makes using Azureus a pain in the a**.

Windows users have their great µTorrent. Micro-sized and (almost) as feature-rich as Azureus. The bad news is - there is no Linux version, yet. ludde, µTorrent's Swedish developer promised there will be one. I trust he can do it since he already showed his cross-platform dev-skills with his other well-known project ScummVM (which he doesn't maintain anymore). Well, right now we still have to live without a Linux version of µTorrent but the good news is: You can easily run the Windows version using wine. This is what I'm going to explain now. I will show it for Ubuntu but it works simularly for any other distri.

First we need the most current version of wine from the dapper repositories they set up. I'm not sure, but I think it would be a good idea to uninstall any previous version of wine and remove the .wine directory in your home. Beware, though, that you will lose previously installed Windows apps.

sudo echo -e \\ndeb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine

Now we have to start wine once so that it can generate the fake windows. Then we'll install µTorrent. This is fairly easy, since its just one executable file.

winecfg
mkdir -p $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/uTorrent
cd $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/uTorrent
wget http://download.utorrent.com/1.6/utorrent.exe

To the stupid part: If you want nice looking desktop icons you need to have the basic KDE stuff installed. You could for example install KSirtet, K3B or Amarok. I don't know why this is necessary but since I use KDE apps in Gnome anyway, I don't care. After that start µTorrent for the first time. While still in the directory you just created type this:

wine utorrent.exe

This will bring up µTorrent. Although it is fully operational it looks rather ugly (Win95 style). We are going to change that now. You can skin wine with Windows XP's .msstyles files. As is happens there is a Clearlook style for WinXP so that you can skin your wine apps to look exactly like Gnome apps using a Windows XP skin. You can get the Clearlook Redux at deviantART.

To make it work you need to create a news directory:

 mkdir -p $HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/resources/themes/Clearlook

All you have to do now, is rename the "Clearlook Redux.msstyles" to "Clearlook.msstyles" and copy it to the directory you just created. Then you start winecfg and chose it in the Desktop Integration tab.

That's it. Have fun using µTorrent.
Matthias