rTorrent Cheat Sheet

Note: If you’re in a real hurry, the link to the cheat sheet is given at the end of the post. Have fun

In my quest for that perfect Bit-Torrent client for Linux (read: one that supports scheduling ), I stumbled upon countless, worthless ones such as err.. well you get the picture, right?

uTorrent (on Wine of course) seemed to fit the bill perfectly but then.. scheduled downloads mysteriously failed to complete. Only god knows why. So off I went in search of a better solution..

.. and that’s how I came across rTorrent. I’ve always like CLI solutions to problems (even when that pretty GUI client slaps you in the face and reminds you it’s there) and rTorrent’s minimalistic but powerful features impressed me. It supported scheduling, of course.. (albeit not in as elegant a way as some other solutions) and the learning curve wasn’t too steep either. Besides, it was optimized for high performance and the creator claims a 3x improvement in seeding speeds.. Phew!

In case anyone is interested, the first rTorrent resource to check out is the official website. The manpages are somewhat outdated (especially some keyboard shortcuts which haven’t been updated in a while). Read the official User Guide here.

Scheduling is accomplished using the schedule = option in the main config file (.rtorrent.rc in your home folder). For BSNL night-birds, the following commands may prove useful (this is what I have in my .rtorrent.rc):

# BSNL Scheduling...
schedule = night_dl,03:00:00,0,download_rate=0
schedule = night_ul,03:00:00,0,upload_rate=48

schedule = peak_dl,08:00:00,0,download_rate=1
schedule = peak_ul,08:00:00,0,upload_rate=2

Just to be clear, download/upload rate of zero turns off throttling, it doesn’t throttle the rate to zero. Also, check out the man-pages for info on the format and the meaning of the various parameters for schedule.

Finishing off, I’d like to add that I’ve made a little “cheat sheet” or quick-reference card (I just compiled it from the User Guide and man-pages) for rTorrent. Do check it out and send in suggestions!

rTorrent Quick Reference Card [pdf]

Freedom Atlast!

After 5 months of trying out umpteen different distros, Jaunty is finally working as expected! My Intel WiFi device was detected instantly and after installing the nVidia drivers, brightness controls are working flawlessly as well.. I couldn’t be happier!

The only remaining issue is getting the brightness function keys to work, but that’s no biggie.. I can live without that. The important thing is that I can bid Vista buh-bye and get back to Linux… finally!

About Jaunty, it’s a wonderful distro, no doubt. Probably the best I’ve ever used… It boots so quickly that I almost fainted the first time around. The overall performance seems to have improved too, and not to forget the user-friendliness part – Canonical seems to be putting in a lot of effort into this aspect. Plus I chose to use the all-new ext4 file-system which is working great as well.

It’s hardly been a day since I installed it, and Jaunty has managed to impress me quite a bit. Let’s hope things don’t go wrong in the coming days.. You never know!

Update:
Here’s a screenie of my current desktop:

And here’s a link to my .conkyrc in case you’re interested..

Jaunty

After a surprisingly long break from the Linux world (about 5 months), it seems my woes are finally going to be over (Vista is torture. Period). With Jaunty released today, hopes are high..

The wireless card won’t give me any headaches… It’s the brightness controls (or the lack thereof) that will make or break my day. The Jaunty ISO is currently sitting in my download queue, waiting for the clock to strike 2 a.m. when it will finally start downloading. Fingers crossed…!!

Predictions…

On 27 December 2008, Windows 7 Beta was leaked onto the Internet. According to a performance test by ZDNet, Windows 7 Beta has beaten both Windows XP and Vista in several key areas, including boot and shutting down time, working with files and loading documents; others, including PC Pro benchmarks for typical office activities and video-editing, remain identical to Vista and slower than XP.

– Wikipedia.

Microsoft, as usual, is hoping that their next Windows version succeeds in the market. After the disaster that Vista was, it’ll take some mighty hard work (not to mention luck) on their part to get the ball back in their court.

A few years ago, owing to Vista’s failure, many regular computer users reverted to XP while the few adventurous ones gave Linux a try… a serious try. A still smaller fraction of the latter few actually liked Linux and decided never to turn back.

Now, if Windows 7 turns out to be even half as popular as XP, Linux adoption will again take a back seat – the process has already started IMO, judging by the popularity of the Beta. People will upgrade their XP machines saying “Finally, the Windows version that I was waiting for has arrived!”.

Meanwhile, the Linux and Open Source community will go on about their jobs, slowly but steadily creating software that’s far superior to anything that the corporate world could ever hope to produce.

And one day, many years from now, Microsoft will screw up again… perhaps with Windows 10. People will get a 2 or 3 year gap where they’ll have a choice to either stay with Windows or move onto Linux. Some will move on – in fact many will move on, since Linux will have become so much better by then.

And before long, Microsoft will bounce back – and they’ll still get users that upgrade their PC’s and be all fired up about switching to a newer version of Windows (humans!). But this time around, the numbers will be smaller.

The cycle will go on… but not until eternity. Very soon, Microsoft, or any other software giant for that matter will struggle, trying to keep up with the elephantine OSS movement. Acts of desperation… until one fine day, a long way away from now, the world will mourn the death of Windows.

Ah! What a theory! I’m so proud of myself…

Too bad I’ll be dead before anyone even thinks about “The Year of the Windows Desktop”.

DataOne arrives

BSNL DataOne – The monster 2 Mb/s broadband connection. The dream, my friends, has at last come true!

I have had some weird encounters with broadband connections in the past.. Take ‘03 for example. It was a time when the rest of the world was getting used to broadband. And I was not to be left behind. So I looked around.. and found my neighbour working on his Ph.D thesis – On his all new 512 Kb/s cable connection. *big grin*.

Thus began a long week of purchasing cables, crimping them in crossover mode (nightmare, I tell you!), configuring the system for connection sharing, realizing I messed up in the crimping, doing everything all over again.. etc.

At the end of the week, when I was finally browsing at the promised speeds (and he was getting dial-up speeds since I was using up all the bandwidth *big grin number 2*).. disaster struck. In all the excitement, I had completely forgotten that my Board exams (I was in class 10th back then) were inching closer.. And it seemed my parents were just waiting for the connection to be up and running before they spilled out the bad news: “Son, you’re spending way too much time “watching” the computer. You’ll have to pack it up.. And Oh, that means no more internet!”

By the time I was free again, the neighbour was done with his goddamn Ph.D and I was done with my broadband. Sigh.

If I were to plot the average connection speeds I had gotten till 2006, it’d be a straight line, hovering around 30 Kb/s.. with a few pulses thrown in here and there.

From 2006 to ‘07, I used GPRS. Oooohh GPRS. I can’t find enough (swear) words to describe it. But it was better than nothing..

2007 ushered in the era of “Huawei” (I’m referring to BSNL DataCard here..). It was better than GPRS. But only marginally so.

And in December 2008 I switched to *drum rolls* DataOne. As of now, I have no complaints whatsoever. The 2.5 Gb/s cap is just fine and the speeds are amazing. Their “portal” seems to go down very often which usually means I’m unable to check my current usage for days at a time. But that’s a minor glitch in an otherwise superb connection.

Compared to “Huawei”, DataOne is well, beyond comparison.. But I do miss the little white modem with its long tail. Whenever the speeds seemed to go down, I would try re-positioning the device, sometimes on the CPU, sometimes under it. In fact, I spent a considerable amount of time doing just this.. and as a result, I knew exactly which spatial co-ordinate yielded what speeds! Ahh sweet memories!

And so the story goes.. I hope the graph never looks down again. I hope the pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. I hope…

Side Note: There’s a nifty little Firefox plug-in that displays DataOne usage in the status bar. It seems to be able to retrieve usage data even when the “portal” is down (most of the time anyway). Download link: DataFox Plug-in.